Original Property Owners: Ambrose and Harriet Dallard

 

Ambrose Dallard and his wife, Harriet Graves Dallard, were the original owners of the lot at 192 Kelley Street. The couple owned possibly all of the land on the north and south sides of Kelley Street; they apportioned out some of these properties to their daughters upon their marriages, and to the church built in 1887 on the land beside the future Historic Dallard-Newman House (built c. 1895).

 

Both Ambrose (1833) and Harriet (1841) were born into slavery on the Yancey family’s Riverbank Plantation, c. 23 miles east of Newtown. Ambrose died on January 4, 1915, at their residence at 243 Kelley Street, Newtown. Harriet died a little over a year later, on June 16, 1916. With their many Dallard family members, Ambrose and Harriet are buried in the nearby Newtown Cemetery.

 

There is little biographical information surviving for Harriet, except that she gave birth to at least eight children. Considerably more is known about Ambrose's life. Besides his accomplished skills as a carpenter and builder, Ambrose is recorded as: a Second Lieutenant in the local Colored Militia (by 1885), a purveyor of vegetable plants especially celery, and a congregation member and later preacher at the John Wesley Methodist Church on Liberty Street. 

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