BROWN COUNTY OHIO - HISTORY: Part 4 (published 1898)
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HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS OF OHIO, By Henry Howe, LL.D., 1898

        RIPLEY IN 1846.  -Ripley is upon the Ohio, ten miles from
Georgetown, nine below Maysville, and about fifty above Cincinnati. The
town was laid out about the period of the war of 1812, by Colonel James
Poage, a native of Virginia, and first named Staunton, from Staunton, Va.;
it was afterwards changed to Ripley, from General Ripley, an officer of
distinction in the war. When the county was first formed the courts were
directed to be held at the house of Alex. Campbell, in this town, until a
permanent seat of justice should be established. For a time it was supposed
that this would be the county-seat; a court-house was begun, but before it
was finished the county-seat was permanently established at Georgetown. The
courts were, for a time, held in the First Presbyterian church, which was
the first public house of worship erected. Ripley is the largest and most
business place in the county, and one of the most flourishing villages on
the Ohio river, within the limits of the Stat
e. The view shows the central part of the town only; it extends about a
mile on the river. Ripley contains 2 Presbyterian, 1 Methodist, 1 Associate
Reformed, 1 New Light, and 1 Catholic church, 20 stores, 1 newspaper
printing office, 1 iron foundry, 1 carding machine, 3 flouring mills, and
had, in 1840, 1,245 inhabitants. The Ripley female seminary, under the
charge of Wm. C. Bissell and lady, has about forty pupils, of both sexes.
This institution admits colored children within its walls; and there are
quite a number of people, in this region, who hold to the doctrine of equal
rights, politically and socially, to all, irrespective of color. -Old Edition.
        Ripley is on the Ohio river about fifty miles southeast of
Cincinnati. Newspapers: Bee and Times, Republican, J.C. Newcomb, editor and
publisher. Churches: 2 Methodist, 1 Presbyterian, 1 Christian, 1 Lutheran,
1 Catholic, 1 Colored Methodist, 1 Colored Baptist. Banks: Citizens
National, J.M. Gilliland, president, E.R. Bell, cashier; Ripley National,
John T. Wilson, president, W.T. Galbreath, cashier.
        MANUFACTURES AND EMPLOYEES. -The Board Manufacturing Co., lumber,
sash, etc., 65 hands; Joseph Fulton, pianos, 23; J.P. Parker, machinery,
etc., 10. State Report 1886.
        Also saw and planing mills, foundry and finishing shop, threshing
machines and horse powers, cigar factories, carriages, tobacco presses and
screws, clod crushers, wire and slat fencing, etc. Population in 1880,
2,546. School census in 1885, 821; J.C. Shumaker, superintendent.
        As long ago as 1827-28 steamboats were built in Ripley, in 1846,
next to Cincinnati, it was the large pork packing place in the State. It
mostly went south in barrels, by flat-boats known as "broad horns," each of
which carried from 1,000 to 1,200 barrels; as many as ten to fifteen boats
left here, in a season for the cotton and sugar plantations; all of this
now changed. Some of the old "broad Horns" were built here; hard work, the
sawing being done mostly by hand. Ripley is quite a horse market, and
monthly on the last Saturday is "stock sales day," when the town is
thronged. Thirty years ago horses in considerable numbers were exported to
Cuba, and Cubans visited the place to buy horses. Ripley has about twenty
tobacco merchants. The Boyd Manufacturing Co., which does business at
Ripley, Higgansport and Levanna, annually manufactures at the latter point
about two miles below about 10,000 tobacco hogsheads in connection with
their extensive planing mill there.
        The town was alive in the war for the Union. As regiment after
regiment from Cincinnati ascended the Ohio on steamers on their way to
Virginia, the men, women and children thronged the river banks with cannon,
flags and music, cheering on the volunteers. Indeed, this was common in all
the river towns on the Ohio side at the outbreak of the rebellion. Ripley
claims to have furnished the first company of volunteers for the
suppression of the rebellion the 13th day of April, 1861; a Union meeting
was in progress when news was telegraphed of the fall of Sumter. A.S.
Leggitt, who afterwards gallantly fell at Stone river, at once wrote out a
heading for an enlistment roll, and was the first to sign it, R.C. Rankin
second, and in quick succession eighty-one others. The officers selected
were as follows: Captain Jacob Ammen, afterwards General Ammen, now of
Ammendale, D.C.; First Lieutenant, E.C. Devore; Second Lieutenant, E.M.
Carey, afterward Major in Twenty-third O.V.I., now decea
sed. At noon next day Captain Ammen started for Columbus, reaching there by
noon on the  15th, by which time Mr. Lincoln had issued the call for 75,000
men.

        Our readers will see in the view of Ripley, taken in 1846, on the
summit of the hill a solitary house; it is there this moment. That house,
in full sight from the Kentucky shore, was in that day as a beacon of
liberty to the fugitives from slavery. It was the residence of Rev. John
Rankin and the first station on the underground railroad to Canada;
thousands of poor fugitives found rest there, not one of whom was ever
recaptured. Among these were Eliza and George Harris, and other characters
of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." While Mr. Rankin claimed to feed the hungry and
clothe the naked, he never gave aid and comfort to those who enticed slaves
to run away.
        The ancestors of John Rankin were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who
emigrated to Pennsylvania 150 years ago. His father, a soldier of the
Revolution, settled in Jefferson county, East Tennessee, where John was
born Feb. 4, 1793. He was educated at Washington College, including
theology, and licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Abingdon, Va. He was
from his cradle, brought up a Rechabite in temperance and an abolitionist.
There was an abolition society in Jefferson county, Tenn., in 1814. While
pastor of Cane Ridge and Concord Churches, in Nicholas and Bourbon
counties, Ky., in 1817, he first began to preach against slavery. Loathing
the institution, he moved to a free land and from the same reason nearly
all families of his congregation at Concord did likewise, emigrating to
Indiana, while he selected Ripley, where, from 1822 to 1866, he was pastor
of the Presbyterian church. He was a great educator; was president of the
"Ripley College," so called, and his house was always f
illed with students in various branches, including theology. In 1836 he was
for a time employed by the American Anti-Slavery Society to travel and
lecture, and was often mobbed. "The aspect of a fierce mob-he once wrote-is
terrible." He was also founder of the free Presbyterian Church of America,
which excluded slaveholders from membership.
        Mr. Rankin died March 18, 1886, at the extraordinary age of
ninety-three years, one month and fourteen days, and lies buried in
Maplewood cemetery, Ripley. He left living eight sons and two daughters.
Seven of this sons fought for the Union under Grant. One of the seven,
Capt. R.C. Rankin, now of Ripley, has at our request given up in a letter
the following interesting reminiscences of slave-hunters, abolition mobs,
Gen. and Admiral Ammen and Gen. Grant, with whom he was a schoolmate.
        THE SLAVE-HUNTERS AT RANKIN'S - All that my father did in the aid
of fugitives was to furnish food and shelter. His sons, of whom there were
nine, did the conveying away. Some attempts were made to search our house.
In March, 1840, four men from Kentucky and one from Ripley with two
bulldogs, came to the house and were met on the porch by mother, of whom
they inquired the way to Mr. Smith's (a neighbor of ours). On being
directed, the spokesman, Amos Shrope, said, "Madam, to be plain with you,
we do not want to go to Mr. Smith's, but there was a store broken open in
Dover, Ky., and we have traced the thief to this house; we want to search
for the goods and the thief." Mother replied, "We neither harbor thieves
nor conceal stolen property, and you are welcome to look through the
house." On starting for the door my brother, Rev. S.G.W. Rankin - now of
Glastenbury, Conn. -took down the rifle from over the door, cocked it, and
called out, "Halt! if you come one step farther I wil
l kill you," and they halted. My brother David and myself had not yet
returned home from conveying the fugitives to the next station North, but
were soon on the scene, when word was sent to town and in a short time the
yard was full of friends. The hunters were not allowed to pass out at the
gate, but were taken by each arm and led to the fence and ordered to climb,
and they climbed!
        MOBBING OF RANKIN. -In the early days of abolitionism my father was
lecturing to an audience in a grove at Winchester, Adams county, Ohio, when
a mob of 200 men armed with clubs marched to the grove and their leader,
Stivers by name, marched down the aisle and up on the stand, drew his club
over father and called out, "Stop speaking or, ____you, I will burst your
head." Father went on as though nothing had happened, when Robert Patten, a
large and powerful man, sprang forward and seized Stivers by the back of
the neck and led him out, and that ended it. On another occasion father was
hit with a goose egg; it struck the collar of his coat and did not break
until it fell, when out came a gosling. He frequently came home with his
horse's mane and tail shaved, when he would calmly remark "it was a
colonization reply to an abolition lecture."
        THE SLAVE-HUNTERS AT THE LONE WIDOWS. - On one occasion I was sent
to go to the house of a lone widow, being told that there were three men in
her house hunting "runaways." I buckled on my revolver under my vest and
proceeded thither. I knew one of the men, a desperate character, who had
killed one man at Hamilton, ,Ohio, and had waylaid and shot another near
his home in Kentucky. I approached him first and asked him to leave the
house; after waiting a few moments and seeing he was not disposed to move,
I put my hand on his breast to gently urge him out, when he ran his right
hand in his pocket and grabbed his revolver; but I was too quick for him,
and had mine cocked within three inches of his eyes and shouted. "Now if
you draw your hand out I will kill you." He believed it and so stood, when
one of his companions stepped up and slipped in his left hand an Allen
self-cocking, six-shooting revolver; I exclaimed, "That will do you no
good, for if you raise your arm I will put
a bullet through your brain." He also believed that.
        In this position we were found by John P. Parker, a colored-citizen
of Ripley, who came in soon after with a double-barrelled shot gun. In a
short time a crowd gathered, and the "hunters" were taken before the mayor
and fined sixty dollars and costs. I could mention many similar incidents.
Through my mother I inherit the same blood that coursed through the veins
of Gen. Sam Houston, of Texas.
        THE AMMENS. -David Ammen, the father of Gen. Jacob and Admiral
Daniel, came from Virginia and settled in Levanna, two miles below Ripley,
and edited the first newspaper published in Brown county, Ohio. He was
there when we came to Ripley in 1822. He soon moved to Ripley and there
published his paper, the Castigator, and first published my father's
letters on slavery in its columns. In 1824 and in 1826 he republished them
in book form and received his pay in the way of rent, he living in one end
of my father's house, a sixty-foot front, still standing on Front street,
my father living in the other end. He was living there when "Jake" as we
called him went to West Point. Jacob Ammen was in Fort Moultrie, Charleston
Harbor, during the days of nullification in 1832; after that he was eight
years a professor in West Point. During this time Grant was a cadet there,
and Jake told me that Ulysses would never have got through had he not given
him special attention.
        On the organization of the Twelfth Ohio volunteer infantry he was
made the lieutenant-colonel, and that is the way I became first lieutenant,
and on the expiration of his term he was made colonel of the Twenty-fourth
Ohio volunteer infantry and commanded a brigade in Nelson's division of
Buell's army. It was he who got to Shiloh or Pittsburg Landing on Sunday,
May 6, in time to fight two hours before dark. Beauregard never came a foot
farther after Ammen's brigade got in position. For this he was commissioned
a brigadier-general. Jake, born in 1808, was the oldest of the family, and
Dan, born in 1820, the youngest, with Mike and Eve between them.
        David Ammen moved to Georgetown, O., and from there Daniel entered
the Naval School. I have never seen him but twice since, and then, he came
here and hunted me up, once by himself and once in company with Gen. Grant,
who was always a personal friend of mine since he went to school here in
Ripley before going to West Point. We were in the same class and once
occupied the same desk. I am one year older than Grant, and Daniel Ammen
must be two years older. Grant told me after the war that he always had a
warm regard for Dan Ammen, that he had saved his life, when boys, bathing
in White Oak creek, in Brown county, hence his promotion to admiral as soon
as Grant became President.
        Gen. Ammen was superintendent of the Ripley Union Schools for
several years prior to the war, during his residence at this place and
while here he married his second wife, the widow of Capt. Geo. W. Shaw, a
graduate of West Point. Her maiden name was Beasley. They now reside, as
does Daniel Ammen, at Ammendale, D.C.


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