They reached Brown County, Ohio, after a dangerous crossing of the swirling Ohio River near the town of Ripley. Price—a stout, five-feet-eight-inch tall man in his twenties with a deformed left foot—and his companions met a Quaker on the Ohio side of the river that night. The Quaker turned out to be a member of the Underground Railroad, which consisted of intricately connected routes in Ohio and other Northern states followed by slaves who had fled their plantations. There were hundreds of them that took runaways to cities in the Northern states, where they moved in with members of the black community or to Canada, where slavery had been outlawed earlier in the century. The slaves’ rescuer moved Price and his friends to Oberlin, a small, quiet town of tree-lined streets that surrounded a village green in the northern part of the state that was home to Oberlin College. Many of its professors were staunch abolitionists. Two of them, James Monroe and Henry Peck, were also among the most active Underground Railroad leaders in Ohio; Monroe was a state legislator.361 There, the trembling runaways found an integrated, liberal-thinking village of 2,250 residents that had prided itself for years on protecting fugitive slaves.
