John Parker: He Crossed the River

The Ohio River is only about a quarter of a mile wide at Ripley. On a moonless night, with a good rowboat, you could cross it in minutes. John Parker crossed it hundreds of times.

Parker was born enslaved in Norfolk, Virginia, in eighteen twenty-seven. He taught himself to read. He was sold south and worked in an iron foundry in Alabama. He persuaded the foundry owner's family to lend him money against his wages, and by age eighteen he had paid for his own freedom. He settled in Ripley, Ohio, in eighteen forty-seven, opened his own foundry, received patents for his inventions, and became a prosperous manufacturer.

And then, at night, he rowed back across the river.

Most Underground Railroad conductors waited on the Ohio side. They received freedom seekers, sheltered them, moved them north. Parker went the other direction. He crossed into Kentucky, found people who were ready to run, and guided them back across the water. He estimated over the course of his life that he guided more than a thousand people to freedom this way. Slave catchers knew his name and put a price on his head, which he estimated at a thousand dollars. He kept crossing anyway.

After the Civil War, Parker continued to run his foundry. He invented an improved tobacco press and a clod-crusher for breaking up farm soil. He held multiple patents. He died in Ripley in nineteen hundred.

In old age, Parker dictated a memoir to a journalist. It sat unpublished for nearly a century, passed down through the journalist's family. It finally appeared in print in nineteen ninety-six, under the title His Promised Land. It is the only book-length firsthand account of an Underground Railroad conductor written from that conductor's own perspective.

The John P. Parker House still stands in Ripley, on the bank of the Ohio, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The river is still a quarter mile wide.