Monthly Archives: September 2019

Silver Spring Historical Society gets no respect

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Jerry McCoy, founder, president, and 20% of the Silver Spring Historical Society membership recently saw a refrigerator magnet in a local CVS. He took a picture and posted it to the SSHS Facebook page with the caption: “#norespect — feeling disappointed at CVS Pharmacy.”

Jerry’s feelings appear to be hurt because the magnet’s maker didn’t include Silver Spring in the places depicted. Boo-hoo.

What about all of Silver Spring’s African American residents who for decades have complained that McCoy’s whites-only histories and historic preservation advocacy has excluded — erased — the Black experience in Silver Spring and the people who were/are part of it? Add to that, histories, placemaking initiatives, and historic preservation products that uncritically celebrate the white supremacists who founded Silver Spring.

Perhaps folks who want anti-racist histories and historic preservation in Silver Spring should adopt the hashtag, #norespect and share it each time Jerry and his merry band of building huggers posts something.

 

Ephemera: Barbershop

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The editor of a monthly Pittsburgh neighborhood newspaper recently asked me to cover a benefit being held at a local cafe. The benefit was to raise money for a customer battling stage 4 brain cancer.

Naturally, I had to ask about the building’s history. The owners proudly told me that the building they lovingly rehabilitated in 2017 was used for more than a century as a barbershop. One of them even described the meticulous research he had done to confirm what nearby residents had told him.

Advertisement, Pittsburgh Daily Post, November 2, 1912.

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A son of Moses in Pittsburgh’s North Side

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Introduction

Moses Order logo, c. 1887.

I first “met” Henry White in 2017 while researching a suburban Washington, D.C., cemetery. White was a founder and the namesake of White’s Tabernacle No. 39 of the Ancient United Order of Sons and Daughters, Brothers and Sisters of Moses. Henry (sometimes called “Harry” in historical records) was born c. 1847 in North Carolina. By the late 1870s, he was married and living in an African American hamlet in the District of Columbia established by free Blacks in the 1830s.

Henry White and his wife, Clara, had several children during their marriage. After Henry died, one of their children moved to Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. Henry White left no diaries or photographs and he died intestate. His traces in the historical record are slim, but compelling. While searching for information that would help me to understand Henry White and his time in Washington, I found a 1930s legal case in which his kin were named as defendants in litigation brought to clear the title to properties in the former hamlet where Henry and Clara raised their children. Among the briefs and depositions were papers filed by William Miles White, a resident of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. He was the same “Miles White” who was just a few months old in June of 1870 when a census enumerator visited Henry and Clara White’s rented Tenallytown (Tenleytown) home.

I finished the cemetery research and its results were presented in a report submitted to the descendants of the people associated with the White’s Tabernacle cemetery and agencies in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. William Miles White and his life in Pennsylvania became an open question to follow up on later. Later arrived in 2019 when we moved back to Pittsburgh.

Like his parents, Miles White left few traces in the historical record. But also like his father, what evidence he did leave raises some intriguing questions about where he lived and how he fit into complicated racialized urban and suburban landscapes. This post is a step towards answering those questions. Continue reading →