The Reverend Edmund Kelly

What Edmund Kelly paid for freedom is not on the marker. Born in Columbia in 1818 to an Irish father and an enslaved mother, he saw his mother sold away when he was six. He left for New England in the 1840s, raised money there and in England, and bought the freedom of his wife and four children for $2,800. He was advised to buy his own freedom too, since the Fugitive Slave Act could still reach him. His son W. D. Kelly served in the 54th Massachusetts, and Kelly made New Bedford his home.

What the plaque says

The Reverend Edmund Kelly Rev. Edmund Kelly was born in Columbia, TN in 1817. At age 16, he went to work at a boy's school. With a strong desire to learn to read, he paid boys with candy for lessons. In 1843, Kelly co-founded and was the first pastor of the Mt. Lebanon Missionary Baptist Church. In October 1843, he became Tennessee's first African-American ordained Evangelist. Kelly believed that enslaved people should join the fight for their freedom. Continued: Continuing his work as an evangelist, Kelly was with a delegation of African-American clergymen that met with President Lincoln and secured permission to minister to escaped slaves behind Union lines in 1863. During Reconstruction, Kelly traveled extensively, preaching and organizing churches and schools in different States in the Union. Kelly died in 1894 was buried in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Mink Slide and East 8th Street — steps away
  Columbia's Black business and church district south of the courthouse square, where on the night of February 25, 1946 a white mob gathered and Black veterans stood guard.
• James K. Polk Home and Museum — 0.4 mi
  The 1816 brick house in Columbia where Polk practiced law and campaigned for the legislature, now a museum that also tells of the people the Polk family enslaved.
• Gordon House and Ferry Site — 15 mi
  A brick house of 1818 beside the Duck River at milepost 407.7 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, where a Chickasaw partner and a Tennessee captain ran a ferry and an inn.
• Henry Horton State Park — 19 mi
  A Duck River park on Governor Henry Horton's former farm in Marshall County, with a mill ruin from 1845, kayak floats and the grave of a governor the House declined to impeach.

More markers nearby

• Freedmen's Savings Bank and Trust Company — 0.3 mi
• Columbia Military Academy — 1.5 mi
• Hood & Schofield, November 24, 1864 — 2.1 mi
• Joseph Brown — 2.9 mi