ABOUT BLACK BOARDINGHOUSES

During the nineteenth century, boardinghouses became a key part of urban life and an ubiquitous feature of the urban landscape. Most historians estimate that between 30-50 percent of urban residents lived in boardinghouses or took in boarders during the course of the nineteenth century.¹ One of the reasons it’s challenging to gain a precise figure on the number of boardinghouses is because they took multiple forms. In terms of services, there are significant differences between boarding, lodging, and rooming houses.² Boardinghouses provided residents board, housekeeping services, and three meals per day served at a common table. Lodging and rooming houses, in comparison, neither fed nor provided housekeeping for their customers.³ Despite these differences, many people used these terms interchangeably throughout the nineteenth century.

It’s also difficult to estimate the number of boarding houses because many who took in boarders chose not to advertise their services. A survey of all thirty-one issues of The Liberator published in the six months leading up to the August 1, 1859 New England Colored Citizens’ Convention reflects this trend and aversion toward newspaper advertisement. Not one advertisement for a boarding, lodging, or rooming house is published within this time range. Some boardinghouse owners even opted not to list their occupation in city directories. Yet, when one looks through the pages of nineteenth-century city directories, one will find a considerable number of residents listed as boarders.

For some, decisions about advertisement related to the scale of their business. Those who recognized themselves as accepting boarders within “private residences” or “private families” and typically housed fewer boarders were less likely to advertise than those who operated larger boardinghomes. Often women took in lodgers within private residences for short periods of time. These lodgers often consisted of newcomers to cities who did not have sufficient financial resources to rent or buy a place of their own. Travelers such as those attending Colored Conventions also fell within the category of short-term boarders. In these cases, boardinghouses provided temporary lodging to those in need and also provided African American women with supplemental income.⁴

In other instances, rhetorical choices reflected nineteenth-century ideas about social respectability. People from middle- and upper-class backgrounds often opted to describe themselves as “hosting” guests or friends rather than embracing the label of boardinghouse owner. Despite the pervasiveness of boardinghouses in nineteenth-century urban culture, these decisions reveal the ways in which certain professions were stigmatized.⁵ Yet, others shied away from labeling themselves as boardinghouse owners for purely economic reasons. In some areas, boardinghouse owners were required to pay additional taxes and secure licenses. Opting not to advertise one’s services in print marked one way these savvy entrepreneurs skirted costly regulations.⁶

Other women operated boarding establishments specifically designed for the purpose. Typically, these types of boardinghouses were more prevalent in urban rather than rural areas. It’s also important to recognize that although these types of homes consisted of the smallest percentage of boarding facilities they are the ones that dominate the printed record. Historians estimate that between 5-10 percent of blackboarding house owners published such advertisements. Despite the fact that this represents just a small fraction of boardinghouses during the nineteenth century, these advertisements often form the basis of scholarship on the topic. These advertisements for “fashionable boardinghouses”⁷ often listed amenities and services provided to guests. In this way, the women operating these lodging establishments demonstrated their proficiency as skilled businesswomen.

Nevertheless, boardinghouses played an important role in the Colored Conventions movement serving as another arena for political debate and engagement. Within the boardinghouse, African American women like Mrs. Serena Gardiner of Philadelphia, combined work in the home with social activism.

As you can see through advertisements, location within a Convention city was ideal for a boardinghouse owner. Close proximity to the meeting not only gave them an advantage for attracting business, but also fostered their own engagement with politics. But this was not the only spatiality that mattered. The interior space of the boardinghouse was also significant as a bridge between the gendered spheres of the home and of political engagement.

For the boardinghouses patronized during the Colored Conventions, there is currently very little attributable documentation about the architecture and interior spaces. However, by consulting a variety of contemporaneous sources, we can make educated speculations about these establishments.

Credits

Researched and written by Jenn Briggs. Edited by Dr. P. Gabrielle Foreman.

Sources

[Advertisement], The Liberator (Boston, MA), May 30, 1835. Accessible Archives. The Liberator. Reproduced by permission. www.accessible-archives.com/

“Boarding & Lodging,” Freedom’s Journal (New York), June 13, 1828. Accessible Archives. African American Newspapers: The 19th Century. Reproduced by permission. www.accessible-archives.com/

[Dr. C. I. Mottley; Mrs. John J. Buckner; Ravenna], Cleveland Gazette, February 2, 1895, 3. America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Genteel Private Boardinghouse.” The Liberator, May 30, 1835. Accessible Archives. The Liberator. Reproduced by permission. www.accessible-archives.com/

Suffrage Convention of the Colored Citizens of New York, Troy, Spetember 14, 1858. https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/239

A.B. Frost and A. Lindsay (engraver), “L–Look like I ain’t onderstan’ yer good.” 1889. Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-fbfc-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Carla Peterson, Doers of the Word: African American Women Speakers and Writes in the North (1839-1880) (New York: Oxford University Press: 1995)

Caroline Still Anderson, [Letter: date unknown] 2-3. Reproduced with permission courtesy of William Still: An African American Abolitionist Collection, Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA. 

Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

George Augustus Sala, “Street scene in Philadelphia.” 1882. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The New York Public Library. Digital Collections. Accessed May 5, 2016. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-b7a4-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Historic American Buildings Survey, “Paymaster’s Quarters, Harpers Ferry, Jefferson County, WV.” Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. , http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/wv0161/.

Juliet E.K. Walker, “Boardinghouse Enterprises and Property Ownership,” in The History of Black Businesses in America, 143-146.

Juliet E.K. Walker, The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship, Volume 1 to 1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

“Lodging, Boarding, and Rooming Houses,” in The Encyclopedia of American Urban History, edited by David Goldfield. 

M. Peel, “On the Margins: Lodgers and Boarders in Boston, 1860-1900,” Journal of American History 72 (1986): 813-834. 

National Park Service, “Lockwood House,” Harpers Ferry National Historic Park. https://www.nps.gov/hafe/learn/historyculture/lockwood-house.htm.

National Park Service, “The Niagara Movement,” Harpers Ferry National Historic Park. https://www.nps.gov/hafe/learn/historyculture/the-niagara-movement.htm.

Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces (Boston: The Colored Co-Operative Publishing Co., 1900), 143. Digitized by Google https://books.google.com/books?id=BglFAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA103#v=onepage&q&f=false.

W.E.B. Du Bois, [Interior view of room showing furniture, piano, and chandelier], in album (disbound) Negro life in Georgia, U.S.A., v. 3, no. 287, 1899 or 1900. Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. , https://lccn.loc.gov/99472388.

Wendy Gamber, The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

Wendy Gamber, “Tarnished Labor: The Home, the Market, and the Boardinghouse in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 22 (2002): 177-204.

Wendy Gamber, “Away from Home: Middle-Class Boarders in the Nineteenth-Century City,” Journal of Urban History 31 (2005): 289-305.

W.J. Simmons, Men of Mark; Eminent, Progressive, and Rising (Chicago: Johnson Pub. Co., 1887). 

Citations