The Kelton House and the Last Street in Columbus
Near Columbus, Ohio
When Fernando and Sophia Kelton built their home at five eighty-six East Town Street in eighteen fifty-two, it was the last house on the road. Beyond it lay open pasture. That location was not accidental.
Fernando was a Vermont-born merchant who had come to Columbus in the early eighteen thirties and married Sophia Stone in eighteen forty-one. Both were abolitionists, and the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty had made their beliefs a federal crime. Harboring an enslaved person escaping north now carried a fine of one thousand dollars and up to six months in jail. Fernando built his house at the edge of the city anyway.
No one kept a count of how many people passed through. Freedom-seekers did not sign guest registers, and the conductors of the Underground Railroad did not keep records that could be used against them. What the historical record does preserve is one specific person: a young girl named Martha Hartway, who arrived at the Kelton property in eighteen sixty-four after escaping slavery in Virginia. The Keltons raised her as part of the family until her marriage in eighteen seventy-four.
Fernando Kelton was selected to serve as one of Abraham Lincoln's pallbearers when Lincoln's funeral train stopped in Columbus on April twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-five. His coffin lay in state at the Statehouse, six blocks from the Kelton house.
The house is a museum and garden today. The pasture beyond it filled in long ago with the rest of the city. The last house on East Town Street is now surrounded.
