[Footnote 4:  History of Brown County, pp. 313 et seq.; and Lane, Fifty Years and over of Akron and Summit County, Ohio, pp. 579-580.]

Augustus Wattles, a native of Connecticut, made a settlement of Negroes in Mercer County early in the nineteenth century.[1] About the year 1834 many of the freedmen, then concentrating at Cincinnati, were induced to take up 30,000 acres of land in the same vicinity.[2] John Harper of North Carolina manumitted his slaves in 1850 and had them sent to this community.[3] John Randolph of Roanoke freed his slaves at his death, and provided for the purchase of farms for them in Mercer County.[4] The Germans, however, would not allow them to take possession of these lands.  Driven later from Shelby County[5] also, these freedmen finally found homes in Miami County.[7] Then there was one Saunders, a slaveholder of Cabell County, now West Virginia, who liberated his slaves and furnished them homes in free territory.  They finally made their way to Cass County, Michigan, where philanthropists had established a prosperous colored settlement and supplied it with missionaries and teachers.  The slaves of Theodoric H. Gregg of Dinwiddie County, Virginia, were liberated in 1854 and sent to Ohio,[7] where some of them were educated.

[Footnote 1:  Howe, Ohio Historical Collections, p. 356.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., p. 356.]

[Footnote 3:  Manuscript in the hands of Dr. J.E.  Moreland.]

[Footnote 4:  The African Repository, vol. xxii., pp. 322-323.]

[Footnote 5:  Howe, Ohio Historical Collections, p. 465.]

[Footnote 6:  Ibid., p. 466.]

[Footnote 7:  Simmons, Men of Mark, p. 723.]

Many free persons of color of Virginia and Kentucky went north about the middle of the nineteenth century.  The immediate cause in Virginia was the enactment in 1838 of a law prohibiting the return of such colored students as had been accustomed to go north to attend school after they were denied this privilege in that State.[1] Prominent among these seekers of better opportunities were the parents of Richard De Baptiste.  His father was a popular mechanic of Fredericksburg, where he for years maintained a secret school.[2] A public opinion proscribing the teaching of Negroes was then rendering the effort to enlighten them as unpopular in Kentucky as it was in Virginia.  Thanks to a benevolent Kentuckian, however, an important colored settlement near Xenia, Greene County, Ohio, was then taking shape.  The nucleus of this group was furnished about 1856 by Noah Spears, who secured small farms there for sixteen of his former bondmen.[3] The settlement was not only sought by fugitive slaves and free Negroes, but was selected as the site for Wilberforce University.[4]

[Footnote 1:  Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia, Johns Hopkins University Studies, Series xxxi., No. 3, p. 492; and Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia, 1848, p. 117.]