Lyman Hoyt House

Lyman Hoyt's limestone house stands half a mile from Eleutherian College, and it was probably built by the same hands — the two Greek Revival buildings in Lancaster share the rough-hewn stone and corner quoins of a local builder working for the same cause. Hoyt was a Vermont-born manufacturer who came to Jefferson County in 1834, helped found the Neil's Creek Anti-Slavery Society in 1839, worked to organize the Liberty Party, and backed the college that opened its doors to students of every race and sex ten miles from the Kentucky shore.

His Underground Railroad work is documented in the late nineteenth-century accounts — Hoyt transported freedom seekers between stations and hid them on his property when the slave catchers came through Lancaster. He condemned the Fugitive Slave Law and broke it as a matter of course, in the county where the antislavery community had been organized since the town was young. He died in 1857 — four years before the war his work had helped make inevitable — and his widow Asenath and their seven children carried the family's civil-rights commitments into the next century.

The house is a Network to Freedom site on the National Register — the limestone residence near the college, restored as part of the Lancaster antislavery cluster that includes Eleutherian and the College Hill Cemetery where the founders lie.

The Hoyt House is the archive's conductor's-stone file — the limestone house built alongside the college it supported, whose owner drove fugitives between stations and hid them when the catchers came, in the township that was Indiana's most documented pocket of abolition.