Eliza and the Frozen River

Sometime in the winter of eighteen thirty-eight, a woman crossed the Ohio River on breaking ice, carrying an infant. She made it from the Kentucky shore to the Ohio shore. She climbed the hill above Ripley and knocked on the door of the Rankin House. Inside, the Reverend John Rankin and his family sheltered her and moved her north.

Rankin had built his house on a high hilltop above the river. Tradition says he kept a lantern burning on dark nights, visible from the Kentucky side. His family helped an estimated two thousand freedom seekers over more than four decades. They were so well known that pro-slavery mobs threatened the house repeatedly. Rankin built fortifications and armed his sons.

Years later, Rankin told the story of the woman on the ice to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was then living in Cincinnati. Stowe had been attending the Lane Seminary debates and meeting with freedom seekers who had made their way across the river. She was gathering material without fully knowing yet what she was gathering it for. When she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in eighteen fifty-two, she used the story of the woman on the ice as the basis for her character Eliza, who carries her infant Harry across the frozen Ohio to escape the slave catcher. It is one of the most viscerally affecting scenes in the novel, and it is why the novel broke through.

The woman's name was Eliza Harris. The historical record preserved Rankin's account of her crossing. Her own account of it, if she ever wrote one or told it at length, has not survived.

The Rankin House still stands on that hill. From the front porch, you can see the river she crossed.