Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Near Hestoria Ripley, OH

Ripley is a village in Brown County, Ohio, on the Ohio River about 50 miles southeast of Cincinnati, directly across the river from Kentucky.

Colonel James Poage, a Revolutionary War veteran, arrived in 1804 to claim a 1,000-acre land grant and laid out the town of Staunton in 1812.

The town was renamed Ripley in 1816 to honor General Eleazar Wheelock Ripley, an American officer in the War of 1812.

Because enslaved people could cross the Ohio River from Kentucky into free Ohio at Ripley, the village became one of the most important early stops on the Underground Railroad; its motto is "Freedoms Landing."

The Reverend John Rankin moved to Ripley in 1822 and built a house on Liberty Hill overlooking the river; he signaled freedom seekers with a lantern on a flagpole and gave them shelter, and the John Rankin House is now a National Historic Landmark.

The Rankin family is estimated to have sheltered around 2,000 freedom seekers during their years in Ripley.

An enslaved woman who crossed the frozen Ohio River to Ripley with her child in 1838 and sheltered at the Rankin house became the model for Eliza in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

John P. Parker, who purchased his own freedom, became a successful Ripley industrialist and one of the boldest Underground Railroad conductors, rowing into Kentucky at night to guide escapees across; his Front Street home is now the John P. Parker House museum.

Ripley had 1,591 residents at the 2020 census; the 2010 census counted 759 households in the village.

U.S. Route 52 runs through Ripley along the riverfront, and the village's historic district of 19th-century buildings reflects its era as a busy Ohio River port town.