John P. Parker Operates Successful Iron Foundry While Aiding Freedom-Seekers

John P. Parker, who had purchased his own freedom from an Alabama doctor in 1845, established the Phoenix Foundry in Ripley, Ohio by the early 1850s, manufacturing agricultural implements. He received patents for soil pulverizing machinery in 1884-85, but his entrepreneurial success in the 1850s was itself remarkable — a Black-owned manufacturing business operating in the slave-state borderland while he simultaneously ran Underground Railroad missions across the Ohio River.