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Early RepublicCivil War

Felicity Cemetery

Felicity, Clermont County, Ohio

Marker Inscription

The Felicity Cemetery is the burial site of Arthur Fee (1791 – 1879) and Oliver Perry Spencer Fee (1823 – 1873), noted abolitionist and key member of the Underground Railroad

Erected by Clermont County Ohio Convention & Visitors Bureau

The Story

In the decades before the Civil War, the free soil of southern Ohio sat just across the river from slaveholding Kentucky, making its small towns natural way-stations for freedom seekers heading north. Felicity, in Clermont County, lay within this borderland network, and the cemetery here holds the graves of Arthur Fee and Oliver Perry Spencer Fee, the latter remembered as an abolitionist who helped operate the Underground Railroad. Their work meant sheltering and guiding people escaping bondage — quiet, dangerous acts of conscience carried out by ordinary neighbors who believed slavery was a moral wrong worth risking their safety to resist.

Why it matters

The Underground Railroad depended on countless local figures like the Fees, whose homes and courage turned the Ohio River frontier into a threshold between slavery and freedom. Preserving their burial place keeps visible the everyday citizens whose defiance helped push the nation toward emancipation.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

In the decades before the Civil War, the Ohio River was far more than a waterway — it was a moral border. On its southern bank lay Kentucky, a slaveholding state; on its northern bank lay Ohio, where slavery was barred. For a person escaping bondage, crossing that river could mean the difference between being treated as property and being treated as a human being.

Clermont County, in Ohio's southwestern corner, sat squarely in this borderland. Its towns and farms lay within reach of the river, making the region a natural corridor for freedom seekers moving north and a proving ground for the consciences of those who lived there.

Felicity was one of these small communities, and the years of Arthur Fee (1791–1879) and Oliver Perry Spencer Fee (1823–1873) span exactly the era when this borderland tension defined American life — from the founding decades of the republic through the Civil War that finally settled the question of slavery.

People & events

The cemetery here holds the graves of two men, Arthur Fee and Oliver Perry Spencer Fee, the younger of whom is remembered as an abolitionist and a key figure in the Underground Railroad.

That phrase — 'Underground Railroad' — can sound almost romantic today, but the work it describes was neither easy nor safe. It meant sheltering strangers who arrived in the dark, providing food and hiding places, and guiding people onward toward safety, all while risking legal penalties and the anger of neighbors who did not share your convictions. It was quiet, dangerous work, done mostly out of public view.

What makes a life like Oliver Perry Spencer Fee's remarkable is precisely that it was lived by an ordinary citizen rather than a national figure. He was not a president or a general. He was a member of a local community who decided that human freedom was worth personal risk — and who acted on that belief in the everyday, unglamorous ways the cause actually depended on.

Its place in the American story

The Underground Railroad had no headquarters, no roster, and no central command. It worked because thousands of individuals — Black and white, famous and forgotten — each did their part along a chain that stretched from the slave states toward the free North and Canada.

That is why a grave in a small Ohio cemetery matters to the national story. The movement toward emancipation was not driven only by great orators and lawmakers; it was carried forward by local people in borderland towns who turned belief into action, one sheltered traveler at a time. Without them, the words of the abolitionist movement would have had no legs to walk on.

The Fees remind us that the struggle over slavery was fought not just in Washington or on distant battlefields, but house by house and county by county, in places exactly like Felicity. Preserving their burial site keeps that grassroots history visible — a reminder that the arc toward freedom was bent by the courage of everyday neighbors.

If you visit

A historic cemetery asks for a different kind of attention than a museum. Come slowly, and read the stones. Here you can find the graves of Arthur Fee and Oliver Perry Spencer Fee, whose dates root them firmly in the era when this stretch of Ohio stood on the front line between slavery and freedom.

Take in the setting as much as the markers themselves. This is the kind of quiet, rural ground where the people who did the difficult, unheralded work of the Underground Railroad are laid to rest — not celebrities of their age, but neighbors whose actions outlived their names.

A stop here fits beautifully into a wider tour of the Ohio River borderland, a landscape dense with antislavery history. Bring a little patience and a little imagination, and let the ordinary surroundings sink in: this was where extraordinary moral courage looked completely ordinary, which is exactly what made it powerful.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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Related people

  • · Arthur Fee
  • · Oliver Perry Spencer Fee

Related events

  • · Underground Railroad

Themes & tags

African American HistoryCivil WarMemorial

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