The Case of Margaret Garner, Part II

Richwood Presbyterian Church, Walton KY
Photo: P. Simcoe

Back from vacation, refreshed and if with many new ideas for the blog. But today let's get back to Margaret's story:

Today, if you go south of Cincinnati on I-75 and take the Richwood Road exit west, you will find yourself far away from the modern grind of traffic and construction even though you are only a few miles from the highway. The road t-bones and on the corner you come face-to-face with history. If you look straight ahead and to the west you will see the land owned by Archibald Gaines, worked by his slaves, and lived on by Margaret Garner -- Maplewood. On the corner immediately to your right you will find the Richwood Presbyterian Church. Founded in 1834, the church was attended by Margaret and other slaves from Maplewood along with the Gaines family. According to church records, Margaret's first-born was even baptized by the Rev. George Bedinger, whose ancesteral estate is immediately across the street.

Hill and road alongside the church which hid Margaret and her companions.
Photo: P. Simcoe

In the middle of the night of January 28, 1856, Margaret, her children, her husband Robert, and his elderly parents met on the road out of Richwood Station, a road which can still be driven alongside the church's southern side. Having stolen a sleigh and horses from the Marshall family, who owned Robert and his parents, they were ready for their escape. Prof. Stephen Weisenburger sets the scene very well: "The next part we have to imagine. The incredible pall of the winter landscape. The hardly audible hiss of falling and drifting snow. The rustle of dried pine oak leaves like someone shuffling newspapers in another room. Plumes of mist rising from the nostrils of Marshall's horses and the rhythmic chunk-chunk-chunk of hooves in hard-packed snow." (Weisenburger, 54)

The band steered their sleigh out of Richwood Station east to the Lexington-Covington Turnpike, the route which is now marked by I-75 and down into Covington, going through the modern day I-75/71 Cut-in-the-Hill. From here "they left the team [of horses] standing outside of the Washington House, where it was found by the landlord, the horses very much blown from the severe manner in which they had been driven. In the meantime the party of of eight crossed the river of ice...." (Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, Jan. 29, 1856, cited in Reinhardt, 51). In the next part of the Margaret Garner series, I will discuss the crossing of the Ohio and where the Garners went once ensconced in what they thought would be the relative safety of Cincinnati.

Works Cited


Mark Weisneburger, Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South (Hill & Wang: New York), 1998.

Mark Reinhardt, Who Speaks for Margaret Garner: The True Story that Inspired Toni Morrison's "Beloved" (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis), 2010.