Ask The Dispatch: What’s going on with the old two-story house on Fifth Street North? - The Dispatch

COLUMBUS — An effort that started in 2022 to renovate a historic two-story home at 225 Fifth St. N. is picking up steam, as work on the long vacant structure becomes more frequent and obvious.

Who owns the home and for what purpose is it being renovated? Why has it been vacant so long? What stories of Columbus’ past do the old house hold?

Who owns the home and what will it become?

Local attorney Katherine Kerby became sole owner of the two-story home in 2022, a year after her husband, Elias Michael Kerby Jr., passed away. Even with the full cooperation of the Kerby estate, she said it took almost a year to clear the “very tangled” title.

She plans to convert the old home into two townhouse units for rent and build a separate office space on the property. She is still debating whether to move her law office to the freestanding building.

What is the home’s history?

Built in the early 1830s, the home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as part of Columbus’ Downtown Historic District. A wooden rear addition was built in the 1880s.

Kerby isn’t sure who built the home. The earliest record she has discovered is the 1848 Keeler map of the city, which lists Richard Sykes as owner.

It came into the Kerby family in 1922, when Mike Kerby bought the home in a tax sale, Katherine said. She put together the past century of the home’s history through documents she discovered in boxes stacked in its corners.

“I’m finding the history literally in the house,” Katherine said.

Mike Kerby came to Columbus around 1910, immigrating to the U.S. from an area that is now southeastern Turkey to escape the Armenian genocide. He ran a dry goods store downtown for nearly 50 years.

The same year he bought the home, Mike, 44, married 18-year-old Sadie Bostani, an immigrant from Lebanon who Katherine said became a renowned cook in town.

Mike and Sadie raised their three children – Elias Michael Sr. (whose first name honors a monk who hid Mike in a monastery in his home region on his flight from persecution), Leah and Mary – in the home’s lower floor, while they used the upstairs as a “haven” for extended relatives immigrating to the U.S.

Mike died in the 1960s, and until her death in the mid-90s, Sadie lived with Leah in the home. Leah, who taught 46 years in Columbus, most of her career as a third-grade teacher at Franklin Academy, lived in the home until her death in 2009. It has been vacant since.

A long ‘lost’ cousin?

Among those who found Mike’s home a “haven” in the 1920s was Joseph Hanna, a recognizable name in Columbus as it is still painted on an exterior brick wall on Catfish Alley.

But Hanna had a little trouble getting to town, according to a written account she found in one of those boxes in the house.

Hanna, who at the time did not speak English, boarded a train when he arrived in the U.S. thinking he was headed for Columbus. The train stopped at the one in Ohio. Someone at that train station realized Hanna was in the wrong place and put him on another train — that went to Columbus, Georgia. Someone there figured out where Hanna was trying to go and pinned a note on the front of his shirt that read, “Send to Columbus, Mississippi to Mike Kerby.”

He finally arrived at the correct Columbus in the middle of the night.

There was apparently a caretaker there, a gentleman of color, who saw the note, read it and said, ‘Oh, I know who Mike Kerby is.’ (He) took him over to … this house. Knocked on the door,” Katherine said. “Mike Kerby answered, and there was his long lost cousin from the old country with a note pinned on him.”

Hanna found his own success in the city, running his own shop in Mike’s original location when Mike moved his store to Main Street.

“(These stories are) also a testament to the somewhat overlooked history of immigrants’ (impact) to the Columbus economy in the 19th century,” Katherine said.

Even turning the home into townhouses, Katherine said, is an ode to its history in its own way.

“To my knowledge, it’s the only residential unit in the Downtown Historic District that has allowed ground floor residential use, and that’s because I can prove that it was always that way,” she said.

What work is being done?

Katherine’s restoration will preserve the smooth stucco exterior, as well as the four layers of handmade brick behind it.

The home will substantially maintain its original floors, with just one room needing them restored. It will also keep the original doors, windows/panes, mantle, molding and staircase.

She has restored the plaster on the ceiling and walls, replaced the roof according to historic standards and removed the left and right sections of the porch, restoring the center section. She is adding a porch to the second story.

She removed the 1880s addition to the rear, with city historic preservation commission approval, and plans to build another historically appropriate addition in its place.

That demolition revealed, among other things, an old kitchen chimney original to the property. She also found remnants of an aqueduct system that once caught water from the roof carried through handmade wooden gutters. The water then flowed to an underground cistern.

Specifics and a timeline for the remaining work are unclear, as Katherine awaits architectural designs for the new addition.

The strangest artifact Katherine said she has found is a stone slab at the front of the house – that she has removed for preservation – bearing a carved image of either a sea dragon or a horse head. After some research, her “best guess” is that it is a horse head and an Armenian symbol for freedom, which would certainly make sense.

Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.

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