Rachel Parker was gone more than 14 months, most of that time locked up in Baltimore. Her trial was postponed from time to time.
It was claimed in Baltimore that Rachel Parker was a member of a family named Crocus, and that they were runaway slaves. In an effort to prove this, people were sent to this neighborhood to try to identify other members of the Parker family as in reality belonging to the Crocus family. The attorney who ably defended Rachel Parker was Lloyd Norris. She was acquitted, and she is said to have been the only person so freed in a slave State.
For more than 40 years Rachel lived with the Coates family, near Glenroy. To Granville Coates, Sr., The Press is indebted for the details of the affair, which are from records which he has faithfully preserved.
On the 28th of February, 1918 the Oxford Press carried the following:
The account of the death in Oxford of Rachel Parker Wesley, an aged colored woman, in last week's Oxford Press, has been closely read. Some older citizens, in town and country, recall the circumstances and the high excitement that prevailed at the time Rachel Parker, then a girl, was kidnapped.
Of all the men who desired that justice be done Rachel Parker, who was kidnapped by Thomas McCrery and others on the last day of 1851, from the home of Joseph C. Miller, West Nottingham, township, not one took deeper and more determined interest in the matter than the late Dr. John Miller Dickey of Oxford. He became a leader in the affair and repeatedly went to Baltimore, where Rachel was in jail, and got a number of the most influential citizens of Baltimore interested to have justice brought about. The late Levi K. Brown of Lancaster county was also active in the matter and rendered much valuable assistance.
The matter had now become so generally known that effectual help was received from the late Senator Henry S. Evans, West Chester, who brought the circumstances to the attention of our Legislature, by which means the case became a State affair.
Dr. Dickey and others attended the trial in January, 1853. The proceedings lasted eight days, during which, as one of the claimant's attorneys expressed it, "an entire neighborhood" appeared and "an avalanche of testimony" was borne to the girl's free birth. Evidence was produced from Baltimore that she was not the girl who had been lost. Forty-nine witnesses were heard and many more were ready when a compromise was proposed and agreed to. Notwithstanding this overwhelming evidence, there was still some fear that a Baltimore jury would decide against the girl, and it was thought wise to give way. The chief end was gained: Rachel Parker was declared free born; the same jury gave a verdict also for her sister Elizabeth who had been found in New Orleans and brought North, and the two were restored to their mother.
The costs of the trial were divided, these amounting to $1000, besides $3000 expended by the State of Pennsylvania and heavy outlays by friendly citizens of Baltimore and Chester County.