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Lisbon home has literary history
The house is just short of its 200th birthday.
LISBON — A piece of American history and literature is up for sale.
Fran Toalston said she and her family plan to sell their home and move south.
The two-story brick house at 431 W. Lincoln Way is the birthplace of Clement Vallandingham, who had a not-so-happy life but sparked a fictional short story promoting patriotism.
“It’s a nice old home,” Toalston said last week.
When the couple purchased the house in 1992, they had to fix the roof, repoint the bricks and add a new furnace.
Most of the windows had been shot out with BB guns, said next-door neighbor Pam Susany, who shares a driveway with the Toalstons.
Vallandingham’s father, who also was named Clement, was a Presbyterian minister who came to Lisbon in 1810. The house was built in 1811.
A rear addition was added sometime later, Toalston said.
A sign on the front lawn says only that the younger Vallandingham “was a famous advocate of state’s rights during the Civil War.”
Various sources say he was elected to Congress in 1858, but was defeated later for opposing the war. Union supporters dubbed Vallandingham a “copperhead,” after the snake.
The Democrat attorney annoyed Republican Abraham Lincoln so much that the president had him turned over to the Confederates. Vallandingham left the South, went to Bermuda and then to Canada, where he ran unsuccessfully for governor of Ohio during the war. He later returned to Ohio, but accidentally shot himself.
Vallandingham’s complaints about the United States prompted Edward Everett Hale to write a short story, “The Man Without a Country.” In it, a fictional Army lieutenant tried for treason says he never wants to hear of the United States of America again. A judge orders him to spend the rest of his life in isolation on Navy vessels, where, over the years, he eventually comes to love America.
Lisbon was a stop on the Underground Railroad as escaped blacks moved north. Toalstonsaid she’s been told the house was part of the railroad, like many other older homes in Columbiana County.
Based on the layout of the rooms on the first floor, she said there may be a space where slaves could hide, but she was never able to find a way to gain access.
The two-story house has four bedrooms and sleeping porches for use in summer.
Toalston said she found drawings of a man and a woman in the basement, but has no idea who they are. An old photograph of the house shows an unidentified woman on the front porch.
Tom Wolf, a public education manager for the Ohio Historic Preservation Office, said there are not a lot of public resources for restoring or maintaining private historical structures.
wilkinson@vindy.com