Eliza Harris's Escape Across the Ohio River (February 1838)

In February 1838, an enslaved woman later remembered as Eliza Harris fled across the partially frozen Ohio River near Ripley, carrying her young child from ice floe to ice floe rather than risk recapture, before finding refuge at the home of abolitionist John Rankin. Rankin sheltered her and helped her continue north to freedom, and he later recounted her story directly to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who adapted it into the famous scene of Eliza's river crossing in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," turning one woman's desperate escape into one of the most widely read depictions of slavery's cruelty in American literature.