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many as ten to fifteen boats left here in a season for the cotton and sugar plantations; all of this is now changed. Some of the old "broad horns" were built here; hard work, the sawing being done mostly by hand. Ripley is quite a horse market, and monthly on the last Saturday is "stock sales day," when the town is thronged. Thirty years ago horses in considerable numbers were exported to Cuba, and Cubans visited the place to buy horses. Ripley has about twenty tobacco - merchants. The Boyd Manufacturing Co., which does business at Ripley, Higgansport and Levanna, annually manufactures at the latter point about two miles below about 10,000 tobacco hogsheads in connection with their extensive planing mill there.

The town was alive in the war for the Union. As regiment after regiment from Cincinnati ascended the Ohio on steamers on their way to Virginia, the men, women and children thronged the river banks with cannon, flags

and music, cheering on the volunteers. Indeed, this was common in all the river towns on the Ohio side at the outbreak of the rebellion. Ripley claims to have furnished the first company of volunteers for the suppression of the rebellion the 13th day of April, 1861; an Union meeting was in progress when news was telegraphed of the fall of Sumter. A. S. Leggitt, who afterwards gallantly fell at Stone river, at once wrote out a heading for an enlistment roll, and was the first to sign it, R. C. Rankin second, and in quick succession eighty-one others. The officers selected were as follows: Captain Jacob Ammen, afterwards General Ammen, now of Ammendale, D. C.; First Lieutenant, E. C. Devore Second Lieutenant, E. M. Carey, afterward Major in Twenty-third O. V. I., now deceased. At noon next day Captain Ammen started for Columbus, reaching there by noon on the 15th, by which time Mr. Lincoln had issued the call for 75,000 men.

Our readers will see in the view of Ripley, taken in 1846, on the summit of the hill a solitary house; it is there this moment. That house, in full sight from the Kentucky shore, was in that day as a beacon of liberty to the fugitives from slavery. It was the residence of Rev. John Rankin and the first station on the underground railroad to Canada: thousands of poor fugi

tives found rest there, not one of whom was ever recaptured. Among these were Eliza and George Harris, and other characters of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." While Mr. Rankin claimed to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, he never gave aid and comfort to those who enticed slaves to run away.

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REV. JOHN RANKIN.

The ancestors of John Rankin were ScotchIrish Presbyterians who emigrated to Pennsylvania 150 years ago. His father, a soldier of the Revolution, settled in Jefferson county, East Tennessee, where John was born Feb. 4, 1793. He was educated at Washington College, including theology, and licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Abingdon, Va. He was, from his cradle, brought up a Rechabite in temperance and an abolitionist. There was an abolition society in Jefferson county, Tenn., in 1814. While pastor of Cane Ridge and Concord Churches, in Nicholas and Bourbon counties, Ky., in 1817, he first began to preach against slavery. Loathing the institution, he moved to a free land and from the same reason nearly all the families of his congregation at Concord did likewise, emigrating to Indiana, while he selected Ripley, where, from 1822 to 1866, he was pastor of the Presbyterian church. He was a great educator; was president of the "Ripley College," so called, and his house was always filled with students in various branches, including theology. In 1836 he was for a time employed by the American AntiSlavery Society to travel and lecture, and was often mobbed. "The aspect of a fierce mob-he once wrote-is terrible." He was also founder of the Free Presbyterian Church of America, which excluded slaveholders from membership.

Mr. Rankin died March 18, 1886, at the extraordinary age of ninety-three years, one month and fourteen days, and lies buried in Maplewood cemetery,

Ripley. He left living eight sons and two daughters.

Seven of his sons fought for the Union under Grant. One of the seven, Capt. R. C. Rankin, now of Ripley, has at our request given us in a letter the following interesting reminiscences of slave-hunters, abolition mobs, Gen. and Admiral Ammen and Gen. Grant, with whom he was a schoolmate.

The Slave-Hunters at Rankin's. —All that my father did in the aid of fugitives was to furnish food and shelter. His sons, of whom there were nine, did the conveying away. Some attempts were made to search our house. In March, 1840, four men from Kentucky and one from Ripley, with two bulldogs, came to the house and were met on the porch by mother, of whom they inquired the way to Mr. Smith's (a neighbor of ours). On being directed, the spokesman, Amos Shrope, said, Madam, to be plain with you, we do not want to go to Mr. Smith's, but there was a store broken open in Dover, Ky., and we have traced the thief to this house; we want to search for the goods and the thief." Mother replied, "We neither harbor thieves nor conceal stolen property, and On startcome to look through the house you are weling for the door my brother, Rev. S. G. W. Rankin-now of Glastenbury, Conn.-took down the rifle from over the door, cocked it, and called out, "Halt!" if you come one step farther I will kill you," and they halted. My brother David and myself had not yet returned home from conveying the fugitives to the next station North, but were soon on the scene, when word was sent to town and in a short time the yard was full of friends. The hunters were not allowed to pass out at the gate, but were taken by each arm and led to the fence and ordered to climb, and they climbed!

Mobbing of Rankin.-In the early days of abolitionism my father was lecturing to an audience in a grove at Winchester, Adams co., Ohio, when a mob of 200 men armed with clubs marched to the grove and their leader, Stivers by name, marched down the aisle and up on the stand, drew his club over father and called out, "Stop speaking or, you, I will burst your head." Father went on as though nothing had happened, when Robert Patten, a large and powerful man, sprang forward and seized Stivers by the back of the neck and led him out, and that ended it. another occasion father was hit with a goose egg; it struck the collar of his coat and did not break until it fell, when out came a gosling. He frequently came home with his horse's mane and tail shaved, when he would calmly remark "it was a colonization reply to an abolition lecture.'

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Kentucky. I approached him first and asked him to leave the house; after waiting a few moments and seeing he was not disposed to move, I put my hand on his breast to gently urge him out, when he ran his right hand in his pocket and grabbed his revolver; but I was too quick for him, and had mine cocked within three inches of his eyes and shouted, "Now if you draw your hand out I will kill you. He believed it and so stood, when one of his companions stepped up and slipped in his left hand an Allen self-cocking, sixshooting revolver; I exclaimed, "That will do you no good, for if you raise your arm I will put a bullet through your brain." He also believed that.

In this position we were found by John P. Parker, a colored citizen of Ripley, who came in soon after with a double-barrelled shot gun. In a short time a crowd gathered, and the "hunters" were taken before the mayor and fined sixty dollars and costs. I could mention many similar incidents. Through my mother I inherit the same blood that coursed through the veins of Gen. Sam Houston, of Texas.

The Ammens.-David Ammen, the father of Gen. Jacob and Admiral Daniel, came from Virginia and settled in Levanna, two miles below Ripley, and edited the first newspaper published in Brown co., Ohio. He was there when we came to Ripley in 1822. He soon moved to Ripley and there published his paper, the Castigator, and first published my father's letters on slavery in its columns. In 1824 and in 1826 he republished them in book form and received his pay in the way of rent, he living in one end of my father's house, a sixty-foot front, still standing on Front street, my father living in the other end. He was living there when Jake,' as we called him, went to West Point. Jacob Ammen was in Fort Moultrie, Charleston Harbor, during the days of nullification in 1832: after that he was eight years a professor in West Point. During this time Grant was a cadet there, and Jake told me that Ulysses would never have got through had he not given him special attention.

On the organization of the Twelfth Ohio volunteer infantry he was made the lieutenant-colonel, and that is the way I became first lieutenant, and on the expiration of his term he was made colonel of the Twentyfourth Ohio volunteer infantry and commanded a brigade in Nelson's division of Buell's army. It was he who got to Shiloh or Pittsburg Landing on Sunday, May 6, in time to fight two hours before dark. Beauregard never came a foot farther after Ammen's brigade got in position. For this he was commissioned a brigadier-general. Jake, born in 1808, was the oldest of the family,

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Hannah Grant

U.S. Grant

GRANT AND HIS PARENTS IN THE WAR ERA.

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and Dan, born in 1820, the youngest, with Mike and Eve between them.

David Ammen moved to Georgetown, ()., and from there Daniel entered the Naval School. I have never seen him but twice since, and then he came here and hunted me up, once by himself and once in company with Gen. Grant, who was always a personal friend of mine since he went to school here in Ripley before going to West Point. We were in the same class and once occupied the same desk. I am one year older than Grant, and Daniel Ammen must be two years older. Grant told me after the war that he always

had a warm regard for Dan Ammen, that he had saved his life when boys, bathing in White Oak creek. in Brown county, hence his promotion to admiral as soon as Grant became President.

Gen. Ammen was superintendent of the Ripley Union Schools for several years prior to the war, during his residence at this place, and while here he married his second wife, the widow of Capt. Geo. W. Shaw, a graduate of West Point. Her maiden name was Beasley. They now reside, as does Daniel Ammen, at Ammendale, D. C.

The upper half of the northern prolongation of Brown county, Perry township, is one of the most interesting of spots to the Catholics of Ohio. In 1823 a little log-hut was built in the woods at St. Martin's for the use of the passing missionaries of the church, wherein to administer to the spiritual wants of the few scattered Catholic families of the neighborhood. In 1830 Rev. Martin Kundig, a young man of extraordinary zeal and energy, came and took charge of the mission in the then wilderness. There he lived for many months in a loghut without a window and with no floor but the earth, "where," he in later years wrote, “I lived in solitude and apostolic poverty. It was a school where I learned to live without expense, for I had nothing to spend. I built eleven houses without nails or boards, for I had them not, and I cooked my meals without flour, fat or butter." He thus founded St. Martin's Church, and the seed he sowed has borne fruit a thousand-fold. The now famed Ursuline Convent, with its school attached, at St. Martin's was founded in 1845 by a colony of French nuns and presided over by Mother Julia Chatfield, an English lady from the convent of BoulogneSur-Mer, in France.

The Most Rev. John B. Purcell spent the last few years of his life at St. Martin's, where lie his remains. This much beloved prelate was born at Mallon, County Cork, Ireland. His early years were passed under the care of pious parents and in the service of the church, receiving such education as could be obtained in his native place. At the age of eighteen he emigrated to the United States and soon after reaching Baltimore received a teacher's certificate from the faculty of Asbury College. For two years he was tutor in a private family living on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. At the end of that time he entered as a student Mount St. Mary's College, near Emmitsburg, in the same State. In 1824 he went to Paris to complete his studies at the Seminary of St. Sulpice. May 21. 1826, he was ordained priest by Archbishop DeQuelen, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. He returned to America to fill the chair of Professor of Philosophy in Mount St. Mary's College.

His learning and ability soon attracted the attention of his superiors, and on the death of the Right Rev. Edward Fenwick, Bishop of Cincinnati, in 1832, he was selected by the Pope to fill the vacancy, and October 13, 1833, was consecrated Bishop of the Cincinnati Diocese, which then comprised the entire State. In 1847 the Diocese of Cleveland was erected and in 1868 that of Columbus.

In 1850 Bishop Purcell was appointed Archbishop, receiving the pallium from the Pope's hand the following year. In 1862 he visited Rome for the fourth time, at the invitation of Pope Pius IX. He sat in the great Ecumenical Council of the Vatican of 1869. He founded or established during his career many religious, educational and charitable institutions. His reputation as an able theologian and a scholar was far-reaching, while his gentleness and humility of spirit endeared him not only to those within the Catholic Church, but to the people of the State at large.

HIGGINSPORT is on the Ohio at the mouth of White Oak creek. It was laid out in 1816 by Col. Robert Higgins, a native of Pennsylvania and an officer in the American Revolution. In 1819 the families there were Colonel Higgins, Stephen Colvin, John and James Cochran, Mr. Arbuckle and James Norris. It has 1 Christian, 1 Methodist, 1 Presbyterian, 1 Colored Methodist, 1 German Methodist, 1 German Reformed church. In 1840 the population was 393; in 1880, 862. It has 17 tobacco warehouses and about 30 tobacco-buyers who annually ship about two millions of pounds.

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