Jason Bull, a methodist minister, maintained an Underground Railroad station at his home in Clintonville, Franklin County, Ohio. The Bulls’ house was said to be on the route from Ripley, Ohio where the Rankins and other freedom fighters lived.
In 1824, James Duncan became a Presbyterian minister at Vevay. An associate of the anti-slavery preachers James Dickey and John Todd, Duncan wrote and published A Treatise on Slavery: In which is Shewn Forth the Evil of Slave Holding, both from the Light of Nature and Divine Revelation. He urged voters to support men who favored freedom. In 1840 Reverend Duncan was associated with the formation of the Liberty Party that favored immediate emancipation.
In 1823 John Pavy, Baptist preacher at Fredericksburg (Warsaw), was run out of town for his strong anti-slavery views. He, his wife Jane Wynn Pavy, and his family that included seven sons, three of whom became ministers of the Gospel, crossed the Ohio River into Indiana. The first documented Underground Railroad station in Switzerland County was established about 1824 by John Pavy, a Baptist preacher at Vevay, and his brother-in-law Stephen R. Girard. They operated the Vevay Underground Railroad station for many years. John Pavy’s lands straddled today’s SR 56 one-mile north of Vevay on the way to Mr. Sterling. Fugitive slavers were brought from the Ohio River, then hidden, fed and protected in the Pavy barn.
In the Jefferson County community of Mount Pleasant, Quaker Charles Osborn issued the first edition of The Philanthropist in August 1817. Osborn’s short-lived publication is considered the first anti-slavery newspaper in the United States and the first to call for “immediate, unconditional emancipation.”
William Paul Quinn, the fourth bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was born on April 10, 1788 in Calcutta, India. Quinn was admitted to the conference in 1816 and present at the organization of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816. He was ordained a deacon in 1818 and an elder in 1838. Bishop Quinn pastored in Goultown, Springtown and Salem Churches in New Jersey. He also pastored in Pennsylvania and Illinois. He did monumental work as a great missionary: preaching, traveling and organizing churches in the “Western Mission.” He defied slavery and organized churches in Missouri and Kentucky. When he submitted his report on the churches he established, the General Conference at Pittsburgh, PA elected him a bishop on May 19, 1844. He became the Senior Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church May 9, 1849, and remained in that position until his death in Richmond, IN, February 3, 1873. Quinn served as the Senior Bishop for 24 years and 8 months, the longest term a Senior Bishop had served up to that time.
Elijah Abel was born a free man and baptized in Maryland in 1832, just two years after the organization of the church. He moved to Kirtland, OH to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was there ordained to the office of elder in 1836. Six months later he was called to serve in the third quorum of the seventy and received a patriarchal blessing from Joseph Smith, Sr. Elder Abel served his first mission for the Church to New York and Canada. In 1836, he moved from Kirtland to Nauvoo where he participated in the temple ordinance of baptism for the dead. In 1842, he moved again from Nauvoo to Cincinnati where he married Mary Ann Adams. In 1843, a traveling high council visited Cincinnati but refused to recognize Elder Abel for the sake of public appearance and called him to his second mission to the “coloured population” of Cincinnati, marking the first time an African American was restricted in his church activities because of his color. Elder Abel’s life serves as an excellent example of how church priesthood policy evolved from non-existence to strict denial of blessings.
Ephraim Cutler of the Marietta area stood his ground against slavery in Ohio and was considered an active leader in the Underground Railroad. In 1802, as Ohio grappled with issues of statehood, the question of slavery was a divisive one. Following the American Revolution, many of the soldiers who had been paid for their service with land had come from slaveholding Virginia and had brought along their beliefs of human bondage. Cutler was a delegate to the state’s constitutional convention and voted against an amendment that would have made Ohio a slave state.Ephraim Cutler
The Old Rock House (now the Lovejoy Apartments at 2705 College Avenue) was built in 1834-35 for a friend of Elijah P. Lovejoy, the Rev. T. B. Hurlbut. Reported to be another way station on the Underground Railroad, it was also the site of a meeting at which the State Anti-Slavery Society of Illinois was organized, a meeting Lovejoy attended just two weeks before his death
The college, founded in 1848 by the Rev. Thomas Craven of Oxford, Ohio, was the first in Indiana to admit students regardless of race or gender. The large stone building, atop the highest hill in the area, was completed in the mid-1850s. In 1856 there were 18 black students, 10 of whom were born slaves. College officials including former Clermont County resident Dr. Samuel Tibbets, were among the most active participants in the Underground Railroad around Lancaster, which was a stop for fugitives traveling north from Madison. The National Historic Landmark is 6927 W. State Road 250. Open 10 a.m. to 4 pm Monday through Saturday. Admission by donation. (812) 273-9434.
One of the first Ohioans to become a U.S. Senator, Dr. Alexander Campbell moved north after freeing his slaves in Kentucky. He settled in Ripley, OH where he was reputed to be the first doctor and abolitionist of that town. Dr. Campbell was an integral part of Ripley’s Underground Railroad.
Reverend Dyer Burgess, part of the Chillicothe Presbytery, collaborated with Rev. John Rankin to bring freedom seekers safely across the Ohio River.
A former member of the North Carolina Society of Friends, Quaker John H. Bond moved to the Indiana settlement of Cabin Creek in Randolph County. There he became an active participant in helping runaways and founded the Union Literary Institute, a school specializing in teaching former slaves to read and write before they traveled further north.
