Stephanie Reed
During her childhood, Stephanie Reed’s family would often pass through Ripley on their way to her grandparents’ home. The signs she read there about the Rankin house were what prompted her to write Across the Wide River and The Light Across the River. Stephanie is a Latchkey teacher and a volunteer spotter for the National Weather Service. She lives with her husband and two children in Dublin, Ohio.
In 1830s Ohio, Johnny Rankin’s father and brother Lowry think he is too young and hotheaded to work on the Underground Railroad, but Johnny finds a way to help Eliza, a runaway slave from Kentucky, try to convey her entire family to freedom. Includes historical notes about the Rankin family, their friend Harriet Beecher Stowe, and her use of Eliza’s story in her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
In Ohio in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Lowry Rankin opposes slavery but resents that aiding his family’s work on the Underground Railroad continually robs him of sleep and interferes with his plans for the future.