Two enslaved men and a woman escaped from Boone County, Kentucky in November 1852. With assistance from white abolitionist Levi Coffin in Cincinnati, the three freedom seekers boarded a train. Aboard the train, their slaveholder's nephew, Donn Piatt, recognized the three freedom seekers and persuaded them to disembark with him at West Liberty, Ohio. Piatt promised to steady work and vowed to purchase their freedom. Free Blacks nearby, however, rightly doubted Piatt's motives. Free Blacks and their white allies secured a writ of habeas corpus to compel Donn Piatt and his father, Benjamin McCullough Piatt, to bring the freedom seekers to a court hearing in nearby Bellefontaine. After a local jduge released the freedom seekers, a Black barber named Wililam Johnson drove the freedom seekers to nearby Northwood. There, students and faculty at Geneva College sheltered the freedom seekers for two weeks, before helping guide them to Sandusky, Ohio. The freedom seekers boarded Capt. Sylvester Atwood's steamer the Arrow, and safely landed in Fort Malden near Amherstburg, Canada West.
"Fugitive Slave Case in one Chapter," Ravenna (OH) Ohio Star, December 1, 1852, p. 3