PARKERSBURG - The Mid-Ohio Valley played a pivotal role in helping black slaves escape to freedom, but it is a history that has largely remained hidden throughout the years.
Local historian Henry Burke said the valley played an important role in creation of the Underground Railroad, a series of safe stops for escaped slaves attempting to reach the North. Since the area lies along the Ohio River and borders Ohio, which narrowly voted to stay a free state, Parkersburg and the surrounding area became an ideal place to cross out of then-Virginia into freedom.
"This area was the first significant settlement after the Revolutionary War," Burke said.
Many of those coming to the area were former Union soldiers, bringing with them anti-slavery sentiments. Slavery was well-entrenched in south and southeastern Virginia. Though Ohio as a state had a relatively friendly relationship with Virginia, these varying beliefs set the stage for a quiet conflict.
"This contrast set up the Underground Railroad," Burke said. "The southern slave owners were suffering a financial loss every time a slave ran away, but the people in Ohio were helping these slaves to escape."
Washington County in Ohio alone had 65 miles of shoreline, which allowed runaway slaves to use the river to travel and to hide, he said.
"There were relatively few slaves in this area and the Eastern Panhandle when compared with other slave states," Burke said. "But what happened here did have a tremendous impact because it set the stage for what everyone else was doing."
Burke said the area has also given rise to several prominent African-Americans and locations that played major roles in black history. Among them were:
* Michah "Cajoe" Phillips, a stationmaster in Waterford who was a Revolutionary War veteran and former Blennerhassett Island Plantation slave. After the fall of the Blennerhassett family, Phillips left the island and came to Waterford in 1807 where he established the Waterford Station. He died in the year 1861, and was said to have lived to the age between 120 and 125.
* Charlotte Scott was an ex-slave living in Marietta, Ohio, in 1865 when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Scott donated her savings, an amount of $5, toward the construction of a monument recognizing Lincoln's contribution to ending slavery. Charlotte's contribution set off a fundraising effort that gathered more than $16,000 and led to the creation of a 12-foot tall Lincoln Emancipation Proclamation Monument, which now stands in Lincoln Square in Washington, D.C.
* Kenneth Thomas was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1930, but grew up in Marietta. In the 1980s Thomas was CEO of the L.A. Sentinel in Los Angeles, the largest black-owned newspaper on the West Coast. Thomas also spent years as a prominent lawyer until his death in 1997.
* John Robert "J.R." Clifford was born in 1848 in Williamsport, Va., near what is now Moorefield, W.Va. A Civil War soldier, Clifford was best known as the first African-American attorney admitted to the West Virginia State Bar. Clifford won a landmark civil rights case in 1898 against the state Board of Education, arguing against an abbreviated school year for black students in Tucker County. The decision against the board helped bolster education rights for African-Americans in West Virginia. In 1933, Clifford died in Martinsburg at the age of 85.
* In Parkersburg, the Sumner School house was established in 1862 as the first free school south of the Mason-Dixon Line, two years before the first public school system was created in West Virginia. The first high school class graduated in 1887. The school was closed in 1955 when the state began to integrate schools, but was renovated into a museum in the 1990s.
Burke said one reason few people in the area seem to know much about the history of African-Americans in the Mid-Ohio Valley is because of a reluctance to acknowledge its importance. The area remains largely white, with a small black population. Burke said it is a hidden history that has yet to be truly recognized.
"Our black population is very small when compared with our white population," Burke said. "I see resistance (to people discussing the area's black history), because I have been out there telling people for 30 years about these things" and many people still don't know, he said.
