being seen based on the proximity of the house to the river. From there the family could raise a lantern on a flagpole to signal fleeing slaves in Kentucky when it was safe for them to cross into the free state of Ohio. Rankin also constructed a staircase leading up the hill to the house for slaves to climb up to safety on their way further north. For over forty years leading up to the Civil War, many of the slaves who escaped to freedom through Ripley stayed at the family's home. According to him, "I have had under my roof as many as twelve fugitive slaves at a time, all of whom made good their way to Victoria's dominions [Canada]," sometimes entire families. It became known as the Rankin House and is now a US National historic landmark (see photos). The real Eliza During a visit by Rankin to Lane Theological Seminary to see one of his sons, he told Professor Calvin Stowe the story of a woman the Rankins had housed in 1838 after she escaped by crossing the frozen Ohio River with her child in her arms. Stowe's wife (Harriet Beecher Stowe) also heard the account and later modeled the character Eliza in her book Uncle Tom's Cabin after the woman. Film depiction Brothers of the Borderland, a film that depicts Rankin's work in the Underground Railroad in Ripley, is a permanent feature of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Letters on Slavery Early in his time in Ripley, Rankin learned that his brother Thomas, a merchant in Augusta County, Virginia, had purchased slaves. He was provoked to write a series of anti-slavery letters to his brother that were published by the editor of the local Ripley newspaper The Castigator. When the letters were published in book form in 1826 as Letters on Slavery, they provided one of the first clearly articulated anti-slavery views printed west of the Appalachians. Thomas Rankin, convinced by his brother's words, moved to Ohio in 1827 and freed his slaves. By the 1830s, Letters on Slavery had become standard reading for abolitionists all over the United States. In 1832, William Lloyd Garrison printed them in his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator. Garrison later called Rankin his "anti-slavery father," saying that "his book on slavery was the cause of my entering the anti-slavery conflict." Beyond the pulpit In 1833 Rankin came