Discovering Black History in Southeast Ohio

  Marietta Intelligencer , June 19, 1845.  On Wednesday the 11th inst., the Steamboat "Allegheny Mail" passed this place bound for Pittsburgh. She grounded on Carpenter's bar, five miles above this place, and in the course of the night a servant boy of John O. Price of Maryland, aged 15 years, made his escape from the boat to parts unknown. The account Mr. P. gives of the matter is this. He had been to Cincinnati and while there this boy was permitted to go where he pleased. He made no attempt to escape, and was apparently anxious to return home to Maryland with Mr. Price, who thinks the boy would never have left him had he not been over-persuaded by professed friends, as his mother and other relations are in Mr. P's hands. When he was missed on the morning of the 12th inst., it was feared that he had fallen overboard. But some of the hands on the boat say that in the course of the night, they overheard a man in the garb of a Quaker, who is from the western part o...

The Marietta Register , August 22, 1872 Mr. Editor: An incident, related at the Newbury Harvest Home Picnic, by Mr. A. L. Curtis, ought to be preserved from oblivion.  As near as I can remember, these are his words:   "Some fifty years ago, when slaves were owned on the other side of the river, an energetic colored man named Harry, purchased his freedom from his master, and came over here to work for my father, in order to obtain the balance of the purchase money.  Harry left a wife in bondage, and, as he was still in debt, there was little prospect of obtaining freedom for his wife.  They concluded, as have many since that time, that there was a shorter road to liberty; so one night Harry quietly paddled his canoe across the river, and brought his wife to this side, and made a camp among the rocks just on the other bank of that ravine, not a stone's throw from where we are now standing, hoping to get her to a place of greater security during the coming night. ...

  The Register-Leader , October 7, 1913 To the Editor of the Register-Leader: Dear Sir - Being called to Cutler last year to deliver the Memorial Day address, I was deeply interested to find certain racial conditions whose like I had never seen before. Side by side with an excellent class of white citizens there were an almost equal number of self-respecting, well-dressed, intelligent colored citizens who seemed to be received on terms of social equality by the white people, at least as far as they would have been received had they possessed the same personal qualities without their dark complexion. Of the excellent band which furnished music for the occasion, the leader and ten of the fifteen players were negroes. An elderly colored gentleman was called upon for a brief address, which he made admirably. I found that he had been a teacher for more than a generation, now retired in good circumstances upon his farm. In conversation he was of quiet voice and thoughtful, interesting sp...