With the recent loss of the old Liberty Methodist Church, this early I-House [Plantation Plain] is the last significant landmark that I know of in the long lost settlement of Calvin, in Jasper County. The two-over-two central hallway dwelling also features shed rooms across the rear and, barely visible on the left side of this image, a formerly detached kitchen which was later attached by a breezeway.

Wiley Phillips (1791 or 1792-4 August 1875) is believed to have been the first owner of the house but Sarah Yarborough from Warren County was the first owner of the property and the house may have been built around the time of her marriage to Jesse Tollerson [also recorded as Tollison] in 1813. Wiley Phillips’s nephew, Calvin Fish, is considered the first white child born in Jasper County and was the namesake of the Calvin community. Thomas Smith purchased it in 1833 but sold it to Richard Turner in 1835. Turner never actually lived in the house, though he, and later his estate, owned it until 1863, at which time his son-in-law, Benjamin B. Freeman, sold it to Shelly P. Downs. Downs was a physician and served as surgeon with the 38th Regiment of the Georgia Militia during the Civil War. It was next owned by Seaborn C. Kelly (1836-1872) sometime between 1866 and 1872. Kelly sold the house to James Benton on 15 January 1872. Scarcely three weeks after Kelly sold the house, on 7 February 1872, he and his brother John C. Kelly were murdered in Monticello by Clinton Digby, a cousin of Seaborn Kelly’s wife, in a disputer over a Black laborer. James Benton sold the house to Seaborn Kelly’s son, Burton Clark Kelly, in 1885 and it remained in the family until 1997, though it was unoccupied from circa 1958 until being sold to Philip A. Jones in 1998. Mr. Jones’s extensive research is the source of most of the ownership history.

National Register of Historic Places