Oldham County History Center

Jackson describes the work of the Network to Freedom Program highlighting stories of freedom seekers and their resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, not just in Kentucky but throughout the South. The Program has over 600 members, including sites, facilities and programs. Ms. Jackson has been with this program for 16 years.

Archaeologist Jeannine Kreinbrink describes the operation and business of John Anderson, a notorious slave trader whose farm is located on the border of Mason and Bracken Counties in Kentucky. She describes the story as it unfolds when she and a team of historians, architects and archaeologists, move the slave jail, that was once on the Anderson farm, to the Cincinnati Freedom Center.

Boone County, Kentucky, borders a large area of the Ohio River, strategically placed close to Lawrenceburg, Indiana and Cincinnati, Ohio. The Boone County Library has developed a series of trails that provide an interesting car tour exploring the slave history and escapes along this corridor, which includes the Escape of the 28.

A graduate of Oberlin College, Fairbank had assisted more than 43 slaves across the Ohio River by the time he was 28 years old. He and Delia Webster assisted the Lewis Hayden family to freedom before being caught on their return trip from Maysville to Lexington, Kentucky. Fairbank served four years in the Kentucky state penitentiary before he was pardoned. As soon as he was released, he continued his Underground Railroad activities until he was arrested for assisting a fugitive woman from Louisville for which he was convicted and served 13 years. During those years in prison he worked in the hemp factory and received numerous beatings.

Cincinnati was free soil but not necessarily a place of warm and welcome reception for the freedom seekers. Black Laws were passed to suppress free Black communities in Cincinnati and the mix of free Blacks with enslaved Blacks was highly discouraged. The Margaret Garner case received worldwide attention when Garner and her family was captured in Cincinnati as they fled the A.K. Gaines Maplewood Plantation in Boone County, Kentucky. Garner slit the throats of her four children, killing her two-year-old daughter, rather than have her children enslaved. The family was captured by Gaines and federal marshals and shipped downriver.

Eliza becomes a famous hero in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where she crosses ice floes of the Ohio River with her babe in arms, making it to freedom. Harriet Beecher Stowe bases her fictional character Eliza, on the real Eliza Harris, who not only escapes to free soil, but returns again to assist others to freedom. Ann Hagedorn reads the story of Eliza Harris in the podcast taken from Hagedorn’s book, Beyond the River: The Untold Stories of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad.