Ohio Summer Internship

When I was considering where to do my internship I immediately thought about my old hometown in Southern Ohio. About sixty miles from Cincinnati on the Ohio River, the town of Ripley has the distinction of being home of two of the most prominent abolitionists of the Underground Railroad movement in John P. Parker and Reverend John Rankin. After contacting Ripley Heritage Incorporated (RHI) I was offered a month long position, which turned into a two month project where I not only ended up working on a historical marker project with the state of Ohio, helped to restructure the way merchandise was sold and marketed, was asked to help the county chamber of commerce to brainstorm on ideas for bringing in more tourism, and ended up co-creating a new logo for the county’s in flux tourism bureau. Was it more than I bargained for? The answer was a resounding yes, but the chance to give back to the exact location where my love for history was born was worth it.

The Rankin House is on the National Register and recently gone over an extensive renovation putting it back to the condition of the 1840s through the 1860s when the Rankins were actively living and conducting escaped slaves that would cross the Ohio River on their way to Canada. Rankin, his wife Jean and their thirteen children became symbols for the abolitionist ideal and were often visited by other prominent leaders in the movement. Henry Ward Beecher and his daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe who based the character and the story of Eliza on a true story that Rankin had told them of one of his many passengers, were two of the families most frequent guests.

While RHI have done so much work in their forty years of existence, could I break through an older generation’s close knit group and be able to take them into a new direction in public history, get them to realize the advantages of the internet as a marketing tool, and how in the world would I get the state of Ohio to grant the town a State Historical Marker for a figure that the said had already had enough done for him in the past couple years? These are the challenges I would soon have to tackle head on in rural Southern Ohio.