O.P.S. Fee Store

Felicity, OH

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.

Felicity, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, the Ohio River was the great dividing line between slaveholding Kentucky and free-soil Ohio, and the moment a freedom seeker stepped onto the northern bank the most dangerous leg of the journey began. Felicity, a small Clermont County village a few miles inland, sat squarely on that escape corridor, and Andrew Powell turned his own prosperity into a tool of resistance. Rather than hide his passengers, he moved them in plain sight, using his distinctive and well-recognized private carriage as cover to carry fugitives inland from the river toward the next link in the network. It was a quietly audacious gamble that a respectable man's conspicuous coach would draw less suspicion than a covered wagon on a back road.

Felicity, OH

In the 1840s, the question of slavery was tearing American churches apart from the inside. Nationally, antislavery Methodists broke away in 1843 to form the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, refusing to share communion with slaveholders; here in southern Ohio, just miles from the Ohio River and the slave state of Kentucky, that conviction took local form when forty members walked out of their congregation to found this church in 1847. Clermont County was already a stronghold of abolitionist feeling and Underground Railroad activity, and a congregation defined by its stand against slavery fit naturally into that landscape.

Felicity, OH

Felicity sits in Clermont County in southwestern Ohio, only a short distance from the Ohio River — the line that separated the free state of Ohio from slaveholding Kentucky. In the tense decades before the Civil War, this borderland became a frontline of the Underground Railroad, where freedom seekers who crossed the river depended on a hidden network of conductors and safe houses to guide them northward. Will Sleet's home stood as one node in that clandestine web, and the fact that his role is remembered here points to the courage such work demanded in a community close enough to slavery's reach to make sheltering the escaping dangerous.