[65] George W. Julian, _Life of Joshua R. Giddings_, p. 157.
In a few neighborhoods settlers from the Southern states were helpers. These persons had left the South on account of slavery; they preferred to raise their families away from influences they felt to be harmful; and they pitied the slave. It was easy for them to give shelter to the self-freed negro. In south central Ohio, in a district of four or five counties locally known as the old Chillicothe Presbytery, a number of the early preachers were anti-slavery men from the Southern states. Among the number were John Rankin, of Ripley, James Gilliland, of Red Oak, Jesse Lockhart, of Russellville, Robert B. Dobbins, of Sardinia, Samuel Crothers, of Greenfield, Hugh S. Fullerton, of Chillicothe, and William Dickey, of Ross or Fayette County. The Presbyterian churches over which these men presided became centres of opposition to slavery, and fugitives finding their way into the vicinity of any one of them were likely to receive the needed help.[66] The stations in Bond, Putnam and Bureau counties, Illinois, were kept in part by anti-slavery settlers from the South.
[66] _History of Brown County, Ohio_, p. 313 _et seq._ Also letter of Dr. Isaac M. Beck, Sardinia, O., Dec. 26, 1892. Mr. Beck was born in 1807, and knew personally the clergymen named. He joined the abolition movement in 1835. His excellent letter is verified in various points by other correspondents.
It is a fact worthy of record in this connection that the teachings of the two sects, the Scotch Covenanters and the Wesleyan Methodists, did not exclude the negro from the bonds of Christian brotherhood, and where churches of either denomination existed the Road was likely to be found in active operation. Within the borders of Logan County, Ohio, there were a number of Covenanter homes that received fugitives; and in southern Illinois, between the towns of Chester and Centralia, there was a series of such hospitable places. There were several Wesleyan Methodist stations in Harrison County, Ohio, and with these were intermixed a few of the Covenanter denomination.
It was natural that negro settlements in the free states should be resorted to by fugitive slaves. The colored people of Greenwich, New Jersey, the Stewart Settlement of Jackson County, Ohio, the Upper and Lower Camps, Brown County, Ohio, and the Colored Settlement, Hamilton County, Indiana, were active. The list of towns and cities in which negroes became coworkers with white persons in harboring and concealing runaways is a long one. Oberlin, Portsmouth and Cincinnati, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Boston, Massachusetts, will suffice as examples.