A few years back I wrote about a ghost sign exposed in Atlanta by a tornado. It was a “Gold Dust Twins” sign that had been painted on a building facade that had subsequently been concealed by the construction of an adjacent building. Atlanta historian Velma Maia Thomas dug deeper into the Gold Dust Twins advertising in a 2015 article published in the online journal, Atlanta Studies.
This post recounts another unexpected meeting with the Gold Dust Twins.
I was reviewing photos in the Library of Congress collections to use in slides for an upcoming program. The photos depict African Americans in Washington neighborhoods near or where Civil War contraband camps had been located. One of the photos I was considering using was one I had seen before. It was taken c. 1916 and it depicts an African American entrepreneur in front of a roadside restaurant — a stand, actually —that he whimsically called the “Fair View Hotel.”
FAIRVIEW HOTEL. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-hec-08027.