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