706 S Center Street
ADDRESS: 706 S. Center Street
BUILT: 1858
ARCHITECTURAL STYLE: AntebellumVernacular
Originally this home was probably a vernacular two-story farm house much like the red house next door at 704 S. Center Street. A part of Lot 36 on the RF&P town layout, the property was owned by John O. Sale from 1858 to 1859 and he built the house.
From 1859 to 1870, Virginia and George Dick and then R.N. and Fanny Sledd owned the house as either a vacation home or a full-time residence. At the time, Ashland was both a residential village and a mineral well company resort where people vacationed.
In 1870, Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton bought the home from the Sledds. She was the child of a well-to-do Richmond merchant who had business dealings with Ellis & Allan, the firm belonging to Edgar Allan Poe’s foster father John Allan.
The families were Richmond neighbors in 1825 when Edgar was 17 and Sarah, known then as Elmira, was 15 or 16. The two young people became close and talked of the possibility of marriage after Poe had finished his education. Elmira’s parents were not pleased. When Poe left for the University of Virginia in 1826, her father intercepted all of the letters between the two. Each thought the other was no longer interested in the relationship.
Elmira went on to marry Alexander Barrett Shelton, a wealthy businessman, in 1829. Shelton died in 1844 leaving Sarah, as she was now called, a wealthy widow with two children. After living in Richmond, Sarah Shelton, her daughter Ann Elizabeth and son-in-law John Henry Leftwich, a retail merchant, moved into this home.
In 1871 or 1872, Shelton made substantial renovations to the house. When she bought it in 1870, the home was assessed at $600. In 1872, it was assessed at $1,500. She probably added the Mansard roof and the full front porch. Mansard roofs were not in style until after the Civil War in the 1870s, although they had been around in Europe much earlier. A Mansard roof was a four-sided hipped roof, flattened on top, with the pitch flaring out at the bottom.
Sarah Shelton sold the home to Captain Luther Ellis and his wife Margaret Virginia Crew. Captain Ellis, like so many other Ashland residents at the time, worked for the RF&P railroad. Two generations of the Ellis family lived here before selling the house in 1947.
Much has been written about Poe and his lost Lenore and about his love affair with Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton. In interviews with Poe biographers after his death, she said Poe told her that she was his lost Lenore character. True or not, it adds an interesting story to the story of this house.