On Sunbury Road, where the city begins to thin and green again, the Agler Freedom House sits modestly behind a line of trees. Its windows are plain, the white clapboard siding unadorned. The casual passerby might miss it entirely. But the ground beneath it carries a memory older than the city of Columbus itself.
In the mid-19th century, this house stood on a quiet stretch of road that was far from quiet in its purpose. Runaway slaves – men, women, and children – moved through here at night, guided by whispered directions and the promise of safety. The Agler family, white abolitionists in a hostile state, took them in. Basements became bunkers, kitchens became waystations.
The people who stopped here weren’t simply “runaways” – they were fugitives under federal law, risking life and limb for the radical act of freedom. They were also freedom seekers, part of a network of the defiant and the determined that would come to be called the Underground Railroad.
More than 150 years later, another kind of traveler found his way to the same door.
When Troy Anthony Harris first stepped into the Agler Freedom House, he was not looking for history. He was looking for a place to bring his cast. This past spring, he had been cast as an Underground Railroad conductor (pictured above lower left) in August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean. The role was personal – he had always admired Wilson’s work, and this was his first chance to step inside one of the playwright’s worlds.
In rehearsal, a friend told him about a real Underground Railroad site in town. Harris arranged a visit for the company.
He didn’t know that, weeks later, the house’s owner would invite him to move in.
“She said, ‘This house was put here to help people in transition. And I see your influence in the community,’” Harris recalls.
When he moved in that May, he was between jobs and living in the basement of a high school friend. He was also a prostate cancer survivor trying to rebuild his life. The Agler Freedom House was supposed to be a three-month refuge. It became a partnership. Harris began researching the home’s history, meeting with local historians, and planning to connect the owners to the upcoming Ohio Underground Railroad Gathering.
“It’s a right place, right time thing,” he says. “I represent so many communities – Black, LGBTQ, artistic, advocacy – and I can bridge them. This house is a bridge too.”
Harris’s ability to move between worlds began long before the Freedom House. Born and raised in Columbus, he entered the Columbus Junior Theater of the Arts at age eight. Saturdays were for theater school – voice lessons, stage blocking, and the magic of transformation.
At school, life was less magical. He was bullied relentlessly for being different – chased home, called names, beaten up. “Kids knew I was gay before I did,” he says. “But theater gave me an avenue to communicate with the world. I could say, ‘I understand you,’ without speaking.”
The Columbus of his youth was a city of contrasts. On one hand, the King-Lincoln District – once called the “Harlem of Columbus” – still carried echoes of its golden age, when jazz greats like Count Basie and Duke Ellington played the neighborhood’s clubs. On the other, systemic racism kept Black neighborhoods segregated, underfunded, and policed. Harris learned early that art could be both sanctuary and resistance.
By high school, he found a new stage: the football field. Inspired by a charismatic upperclassman, Harris trained with Bruce Hart, the drum major of Ohio State University’s legendary marching band.
The position demanded precision and showmanship. It also demanded leadership – commanding a hundred-piece band before thousands of spectators. “I realized I had both a masculine and feminine side, and they could work together,” he says. “It changed how people saw me. I was no longer the kid to pick on – I was the one leading.”
The lesson stuck: visibility could be protection, but it could also be power.
Harris gravitated toward roles that confronted audiences. In The Colored Museum, he played Ms. Raj – a character who, in today’s language, was non-binary, unapologetically feminine, and a truth-teller.
“That role gave me permission to accept myself fully,” he says.
After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, he brought that same energy to historical performance. While others marched, Harris – working at a hospital – chose a different protest: a filmed one-man performance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” for Dublin’s Abbey Theater. The video drew thousands of views and led to another piece – Frederick Douglass’s speech at the dedication of the Freedman’s Memorial.
A former boss told him, “You have a real gift for making Black history three-dimensional.” Harris has carried that line like a calling card ever since.
The Agler Freedom House is not a museum, but Harris treats it as one. He tells visitors about the people who once hid there, and about the risks taken by those who sheltered them. He knows that the Underground Railroad was not a train, not underground, and not universally supported – even in the North. Ohio was a free state, but its Black Laws stripped African Americans of basic rights. Harboring fugitives was a federal crime under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
“This house wasn’t just shelter,” Harris says. “It was defiance.”
For him, living here is about more than paying rent – it’s about stewardship. He is working to connect the home to statewide Underground Railroad commemorations leading up to the United States’ 250th anniversary in 2026.
Harris’s connection to Black history is older than his time here. In childhood, he attended Gallia County’s annual Emancipation Proclamation celebration, the oldest continuously running in the nation. Families brought picnic baskets and folding chairs, speakers told stories of enslavement and freedom, and the past felt close enough to touch.
“Living here feels like two ends of a circle coming together,” he says. “From celebrating emancipation as a kid to now living in a place that sheltered people on the road to freedom.”
Harris has joined the Near East Side Neighborhood Leadership Academy, studying the leadership styles of historic Black Columbus figures and exploring how to apply them today. He continues leading anti-bullying workshops, telling young people to “find what makes you happy and live truthfully.” He is planning a side business to sustain himself independently.
“I’ve lived a high diddly-dee actor’s life,” he says with a grin, “but I can’t do that anymore. I need to live independently, without relying on the kindness of others. But I’ll always be about connecting people. Each of us has a piece of the puzzle – I want to help people find theirs.”
Asked to sum himself up in one word, Harris hesitates, then says: “Inspirational.”
It fits. But the better word might be “continuation.” Like the house he lives in, Harris’s life is proof that the work of the Underground Railroad never really ended – it just took on new forms, new routes, new passengers. And the journey toward freedom, he knows, is never just his own.
----------------------------
DaVante’ Goins is an independent journalist and NAACP Columbus branch member who studied at Wittenberg University and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) & Founder at Kin Worldwide
