This is a multipart diary based on dozens of sources on the life of John P. Parker. See also part one: "John Parker bought his freedom" and part two: "John Parker: foundry by day, freedom by night."
This book and three patents might have been the only record of John Parker, except people argued about Eliza.
Since 1852, Americans had been arguing about the accuracy of Eliza’s escape. In the 1880s -- sources list 1883, 1884, 1885 and 1886 -- Frank Moody Gregg, a reporter with the Chattanooga news, went hunting for Eliza.
He found …
the community that had helped her become free:
He also interviewed Mrs. Chambers Baird, the elderly wife of the Ripley attorney who had helped John Mahan; Mrs. Charles Campbell, a daughter-in-law of Alexander Campbell; Billy Marshall, a free black man who had lived in Ripley from the 1820s on; Lindsay Jackson, Polly Jackson’s brother; and Richard Calvin Rankin, who now lived on Second Street up the alley from the house with three front doors.
In focusing on John Parker, the tree, I have deliberately hidden most of Ripley, the forest.
That forest includes his children.
Six adult children, all of them college graduates.
That’s a phenomenal accomplishment for any family. Any era. Someone always falls short because of a limitation or lack of work ethic.
John Parker’s business experience soured him on business. Fire tore his stuff up a lot. He recovered each time, but if he hadn’t had to deal with torched buildings, he could have done so much more.
He didn’t want his kids to have to deal with that, so his will stipulated that they couldn’t go into business. So one of his kids became a lawyer, and the others went into teaching and music (and teaching music). The college list includes Oberlin -- not a surprise to readers of this diary or readers of Ohio history. It also includes being a surprise African-American student and being the first known such student to graduate.
John Parker’s children became middle-class black professionals in the 1880s. A lawyer, a school principal and a few music teachers.
In all:
Hale Giddings Parker was a lawyer. His wife, Eleanor, may have been a teacher, or that may be his daughter Eleanore (spelling was easier to get wrong back then).
His daughter Hortense is hard to research because she and her aunt share a name.
His son, Hale Jr., was a high school coach in the 1920s at least and a dentist, for how long I don’t know.
Cassius Clay Parker -- named after the same Cassius Clay you know of courtesy of Muhammad Ali -- became a teacher in Indiana.
Horatio Parker became a school principal.
Hortense Parker Gilliam graduated from Mount Holyoke and has her own celebration day. She taught music. Her husband was a school principal.
Bianca and Portia Parker taught music in Norwood, possibly Ohio.
John Parker died in 1900. Praise was absolute:
A more fearless creature never lived. He gloried in danger. … He would go boldly over into the enemy’s camp and filch the fugitive slaves to freedom.
In 1901, his foundry, owned by the Parker estate, was being
managed by Walter A. Knight.
And then things were slowly forgotten. His dictated autobiography had sold poorly at best, partly because it was a black man’s story in racially tense America and partly because it was so physically hard to read -- ever read a reporter’s handwriting? Good luck.
Nine decades later, in 1994, Morehead State University history professor Stuart Seely Sprague got a university grant to study "the Underground Railroad in Kentucky and Ohio, and that work led him to Parker and his autobiography in 1994."
Well. More like, it led him to a public librarian who "handed him a copy of a personal account of a former slave who had been a ‘conductor’ on the Underground Railroad."
Meanwhile, a Cincinnati civil rights attorney studying the abolition movement at Duke University happened upon the manuscript. Two years of research and reading and rereading that reporter’s handwriting later, a book was born: "His Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P. Parker, Former Slave and Conductor of the Underground Railroad."
One newspaper article says of the book:
Newman and Charles Nuckolls, a former high school principal and former city clerk, began shopping the manuscript to publishers. Norton took the project and published the hardbound edition ($20) in late 1996. The book also has been optioned by Tri-Star Pictures as a movie project for director Jonathan Demme, perhaps best-known for "Silence of the Lambs."
With the advance money, Newman and Nuckolls were able to purchase Parker's house in Ripley. It is being renovated to house the John P. Parker Historical Society.
Not long after,
archaeologists were busy working on his house and foundry. (Scroll up for Underground Railroad coverage you saw in a previous diary.) Now it’s a
National Historic Landmark, and the first master of the house has
an award named after him.
We know little at best about the slaves John Parker helped free.
Few would have stayed in Ripley:
1) Ripley was so small that jobs were scarce. Practicality suggests someone newly homeless and foodless isn’t going to stay in a dead-end town long.
2) Ripley was close to slave territory. An escaped slave wasn’t going to risk being near a former master. And since we know Parker employed at least one slave owner or member of a slave-owning family, the risk of being caught was high. Nearly any nearby slave owner would have happily pocketed the reward money.
3) The path led north so encouragingly. Detroit is mentioned in several Underground Railroad stories. Canada is codenamed heaven, and many fugitive slaves escaped to Canada because bringing them back from Canada was so hard.
Wherever they went, these newly free Americans were looking for jobs and families -- economic and personal opportunities and stability that spurred them to run in the first place. Temporary assistance was crucial, whether a train ticket or food or shoes, but fundamentally, you had unpaid and unemployed manual laborers who needed steady work, not charity. They went where work took them and hoped the work would sustain them.
But they were free to work and free to hope.