Sites Associated with James McCune Smith and Family in New York City #5
The House on North Moore Street
The following afternoon, after another day in the New York City archives, I take the subway south to the Frankin Street station. My next stop following James McCune Smith and his family is only a little over a block away. (For sites I visited the day before, click here.).
A quick aside: In this series of posts about visiting McCune Smith-related sites in NYC, I follow them geographically, in the order in which I can get from one to the other most efficiently. In doing so, I end up mostly exploring them out of order chronologically, jumping all over the place in time just as I did in a previous project, my Ordinary Philosophy Traveling Philosophy and History of Ideas series. But when I bring all these stories together in his biography, I’ll consider these places in the order in which they came to have significance in McCune Smith’s life.
In this case, we’re fast-forwarding about three decades, from seeking a young woman building her new life in her self-won freedom to exploring how her son, now a successful professional with a family of his own, took another great step forward in his life. We’ll also get a glimpse into what McCune Smith’s New York world was like in the mid-nineteenth century.
I walk north up Varick Street to where it meets North Moore and take a right. A building right across the street from the site I’m seeking will probably look familiar to most of you – so if you want to visit this site yourself, that’ll make it particularly easy to find! That’s because it’s right across the street from the handsome old firehouse made famous in 1984’s Ghostbusters.
The site is also quite easy to find because the street numbers on North Moore remain unchanged from McCune Smith’s time, as you can see comparing the map below with the addresses in Google Maps. 15 N Moore St is where the office building with external steel framing now stands at the corner of North Moore and Varick.
In 1846, a multistory brick house stood here, probably built prior to 1803 and standing at least until the late 1860’s. On 14 July 1846, Rachel Delamater, widow of Samuel Delamater of an old New York family of French-Dutch extraction, deeded the property to James McCune Smith for the nominal sum of $1. Her husband, as the deed stated, had purchased it in 1803. She conveyed it to McCune Smith in the presence of her son John Delamater, and the conveyance was recorded at the request of McCune Smith the next day.[1] 15 N Moore St came to be the Smith family home far longer than any other – for nearly eighteen years. It’s where 8 of the 10 Smith family children were born, and where – tragically – five of them died. It’s where Malvina and McCune Smith spent most of their happy marriage. It’s where Lavinia Smith came to live in peace and security with her son, her daughter-in-law, and sometimes friends and other family connections for the rest of her long life.[2]
We’ll return to the topic of why Delamater might have given this very substantial bit of property to McCune Smith in a little while. First, we’ll consider some of the Smith family’s experiences in their new home. A little over a decade later, writing as the New York correspondent to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, McCune Smith recalled the hectic scene of moving house
…on May-day. Ah, if you had seen me, Mr. Editor! With number one in the right arm, number two in my left, (he is now a stout boy “doing quadratics”,) a large flexible handled basket full of things slung round my neck in front, and a tin pail ditto ditto in the opposite side, you would have seen a picture indeed; the “missus” did not say much; I fell into the traces at once – but it took me some three years to recover my dignity, and we have not moved since.
McCune Smith later wrote that Malvina took charge of the move, though she was much younger than he: ‘All the women become strong-minded… I think the New York girls make a mental reservation in the “obey” in regard to the first of May...’[3] This was the day that, traditionally, leases expired and a large proportion of New York City’s inhabitants all moved house at once.
So on that day, McCune Smith obediently lugged basket, pail, and two children from 29 Leonard Street (we’ll discuss that site in the next installment) two blocks north up Varick St. It would not have been easy, and not only because he was heavily laden. Another prominent New Yorker also described moving day in New York in this way: ‘our streets [were] crowd[ed] with carts overloaded with sofas, chairs, sideboards, looking glasses & pictures, so as to render the sidewalks almost impassable.’ As to why New Yorkers chose to move in such circumstances,
The practice of all moving in one day, & giving up & hiring Houses in Feb[ruary] is of antient [sic] custom & when the city was small & inhabitants few in number… Few instances of removals were seen, but now N[ew] York is literally in an uproar for several days before & after the 1st of May. This practice of move all, to strangers appears absurd, but it is attended with the advantage of affording a greater choice of abodes in the Fed[ruary] quarter.[4]
When researching my biographical thesis and other works on McCune Smith, I consulted New York City directories, McCune Smith’s letters to Gerrit Smith (by far the largest collection of McCune Smith’s writings in his own hand that survives), and other records which reveal the Smith children’s dates and order of birth, to work out which house move McCune Smith was describing in the passages above. The most telling detail is that McCune Smith and Malvina had just their first two children at the time (Amy and James). The other was that they had not moved house again by the time of McCune Smith’s writing. This means he had to be referring to the move to the 15 N Moore St house. Since McCune Smith’s and Malvina’s address was still at 29 Leonard St in January 1847,[5] that they moved in the month of May, and that McCune Smith first appears in NYC city directories at the 15 N Moore St address in 1847,[6] that dates their move to 1 May 1847.
So why wait almost ten months after they became owners of a nice big house to move their growing family into it? We can look to the New York City directories in addition to the above descriptions of New Yorkers’ moving customs for a likely answer. The year that Delamater deeded the property to McCune Smith, it was being rented by Sarah Ritchie, an upholsterer.[7] The following year, in 1847, Ritchie had moved to a new location.[8] The Smiths, then, would likely have waited to move until Ritchie’s lease was up or until she could find a new place – and since these traditionally happened at the same time in New York City, that’s when everyone involved would have moved.
One thing I had not yet looked closely into was what it would have been like for the Smiths living at 15 N Moore. To get a good idea of what their immediate neighborhood was like, lacking any contemporary firsthand description, were three main sources of information. First, I had the Perris atlas published in 1853 (see above), which is the earliest one that plots out every building with their respective addresses. Next, I looked at a New York City directory for that same year to see who lived at the nearby addresses.[9] Fortunately, I found a word-searchable digitized version, which allowed me to look up the addresses rather than laboriously go through its thousands of entries, line by line, since people are listed by name, not street address. Most directory listings included people’s employment as well. Then, I looked up the names I found in the 1850 US Census and the 1855 New York Census to find out more about them. 1850 was the first year that the US Census began to record such detailed information as the names of every household member along with their age, sex, and relationships to one another, where they were born, literacy, citizenship status, whether they were property owners, and so on. The 1855 New York Census followed suit.
What I found revealed, for one, that the 15 N Moore St home appeared to be in a largely middle-class neighborhood. The Smiths’ neighbors included many business owners, police officers, merchants, lawyers, another physician, a minister, a baker, boardinghouse owners, a tailor, school and music teachers, painters, artists, clerks, metalworkers, and skilled craftspersons of all kinds, including a chronometer maker, a silversmith, and two jewelers.
For those neighbors I was able to find in the census, many were born in the United States, and of those, a majority in New York. About a third, however, were foreign-born and almost all of those in Europe, either Ireland, England, Germany, or France. Just one was born elsewhere, in the West Indies. Very many of the households had servants, mostly young women and girls from Ireland. By 1855, the Smith family had a live-in servant as well, although theirs was born in Canada.
To consider a few examples: one Henry Butler owned a business selling fish and oysters at 2 N Moore St and around the corner at 122 West Broadway. He also lived at the end of the block that the Smith family lived on, at 124 W Broadway, right across the street from his business. I can imagine that if McCune Smith decided to walk to his pharmacy at 93 W Broadway that way instead of taking Varick, he might stop and say hello from time to time. I couldn’t find a Henry Butler in the censuses that I could confirm was the same man; there were many of that same name in New York City. But when I looked in the NYC directories for the years of the censuses, there was no Henry Butler at those N Moore and W Broadway addresses, though there were two others of the same first and last name selling oysters elsewhere.[10] It looks as if Butler was among the many New Yorkers regularly pulling up stakes and moving elsewhere to find a better place to live and do business, likely joining the throngs of others doing the same on May Day.
There was a family named Miller who operated a grocery store at 15 N Moore, likely on the ground floor below the house proper. The NYC directory lists a Mary Miller, widow of John, as a grocer at that address. In a separate line, it also lists a Wopke Miller as a grocer there. An 1851 NYC street directory lists ‘Mater Miller, grocer’ at 15 N Moore (under ‘J. M’Cune Smith, physician’), further indicating that Mary was German, the owner of the store, and perhaps the mother of Wopke – or at least, the matriarch of a family in the grocery business.[11] The 1850 US Census lists a grocer named John W. Miller and his wife, both born in Germany, with two children born in New York. I think this entry is for a Miller in this family; perhaps ‘W.’ is for Wopke. I couldn’t identify them in the 1855 NY Census.
Right next door, at 17 N Moore, Pierre Ponlaye ran a bakery and lived with his family. Born in France, he married a native New Yorker. The 1850 US Census shows that the young couple rented rooms to several other people. They were evidently doing well; they owned $7,000 of real estate (compare this to McCune Smith’s $4,000 the same year). By 1855, they had a daughter and an Irish servant, but no more boarders.
The most significant neighbors for the Smith family, however, were the Delamaters. Her husband Samuel had acquired the property that became 20 N Moore about the same time as that which became 15 N Moore;[12] they were not adjacent to each other, but on the other side of both N Moore and intersected by Varick and one or two lots on either side. Rachel, who was born in New York, appears to have been Samuel’s second wife.[13] He died in 1843, three years before Rachel conveyed the brick house at 15 N Moore to McCune Smith. She lived at 20 N Moore, which her husband had left to her in his will with Rachel Reed; the 1855 NY Census lists her as the elder Rachel’s daughter, but if so, she was probably adopted given the well over 50-year age difference between them. She and the younger Rachel shared the house during these years with Henry E. Evans, a police officer, and his mother.
This deep dive into the Smith family’s neighborhood was interesting in so many ways. One thing that was particularly striking, though, was that every close neighbor – who lived on N Moore between West Broadway and up to no. 30 – that I could cross-identify in the directory and the censuses appeared to be of entirely European descent, except the Smith family and their boarders. This was true even of the Smiths’ Canadian servant. Why would McCune Smith and Malvina, deeply connected as they were to the African American community and involved in so many causes and projects to improve their lives and prospects, choose to move to a neighborhood where the family would have few or no African American neighbors?
My guess: the explanation has much to do with the Delameters, especially the elderly widow Rachel. For some reason, she effectively gave away one of her family homes to the Smith family. I’ve searched and searched but have not yet been able to find any connections in the historical record. For example, I haven’t come across the Delamater name associated with the plethora of African American uplift causes that McCune Smith was so passionately devoted to. Nor have I been able to find evidence of any sort of exchange between them, such as exchanging one property for another. McCune Smith already owned a good deal of property at the time Delameter transferred the house at 15 N. Moore St, so he would likely have been in the position to make such a trade, but there’s no record of one that I have been able to find.
So, my working hypothesis is that there was a direct, personal connection between McCune Smith and one or more of the Delamaters. To me, his medical practice is the most likely source of such a connection. Remember that McCune Smith’s practice was multi-racial; according to one of his protégés that worked and trained in his pharmacy, a substantial majority of McCune Smith’s patients were ‘white’.[14] As I have written elsewhere, it was common for African American medical and pharmaceutical providers to seek to attract as many patients of European descent as possible. For one, this is because they tended to have more money and thus made the business more financially secure – and for those such as McCune Smith who also provided healthcare to African Americans for free or for very low pay, it would have helped fund their ability to do so.[15] It also attracted more potential patients; if those in the upper echelons of the nineteenth-century racial hierarchy patronised their practices, that attracted more business.
So, I’m guessing that this gift of a home was that of a grateful patient. Perhaps McCune Smith cared for Samuel before his death. Perhaps he cared for Rachel – who was already 85 years old when she conveyed the home to McCune Smith in 1846. Perhaps he was the family physician, looking after the health of all the Delamaters. This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that Samuel left only 20 N Moore St to Rachel; 15 N Moore, along with all Samuel’s other real estate, was left to his children to divide or share equally. At this point, I can only guess.
Yet Rachel Delameter did not only convey a property to McCune Smith. In doing so, she was inviting him and his family to be her neighbors. As we’ve seen, she lived just a few houses down and continued to do so until the year she died, in 1855.[16] Apparently, the Delamaters, or at least Rachel and her son John, executor of Samuel’s will who approved the property conveyance, did not share the racial prejudice of so many in that city. And the Smith family appears to have lived peacefully in this neighborhood for nearly two decades, suggesting that their neighbors tended to be tolerant of racial diversity as well. As we shall see, the Smith family did not leave until the final year of McCune Smith’s life.
McCune Smith was a committed and deeply invested New Yorker. Though he appears to have had a good opportunity to remain in Glasgow after graduating from medical school, free from the racial prejudice so rife in the United States, he returned to his beloved native city and became a successful, thriving, important figure there. He sought to improve life for its inhabitants in countless ways, from expanding access to medical care, education, and self-improvement opportunities; fought for equal rights; helped care for the city’s least fortunate, and much more. And the Smiths apparently were attached to their family home at 15 N Moore as well, given that they lived there so long.
However, they finally decided in 1865 that it was time to move out of the city. The Draft Riots of 1863 had caused a large proportion of New York City’s African American community to leave NYC, many crossing the East River to settle in Brooklyn, many moving elsewhere. Probably for the reasons cited above, as well as the fact that their home was never attacked during the riots – further indicating that their close neighbors did not resent African Americans living among them – the Smith family held out on moving longer than many others did. But by January 1865, McCune Smith’s chronic heart ailment had been troubling him terribly, making him sicker than ever and for longer periods. He made what proved to be his final will on 12 January 1865, with Malvina as its executrix, the sole guardian of their children, and the sole beneficiary except for their eldest son, who received $100 outright. Malvina was to manage the estate and the support of their children until they turned 21. After her death, the remainder of the estate was to be divided equally among them.[17] The move to Brooklyn may have been an effort to ensure the family’s comfort and safety after McCune Smith was gone.
Just short of two months after drafting that will, on 8 March, McCune Smith and Malvina purchased a property at 162 South 3rd St in Williamsburgh, Brooklyn, for $3,250.[18] Just over a month later, they sold the 15 N Moore St home for $9,500 to a John Henry Miller.[19] He’s almost certainly the John H. Miller who’s listed that year in an 1865 NYC directory who owned the grocery store downstairs and lived right around the corner at 16 Varick St.[20] He’s also almost certainly a relative of the John ‘Wopke’ Miller who, as we have seen, owned the same grocery store many years before. The following year, John H. Miller’s only business listing is for a liquor store next door at 17 North Moore while his home address remained the same on Varick St. But according to that year’s directory, a builder and two clerks lived at 15 N Moore St.[21] Miller likely, then, turned the house into a boarding house or subdivided it into flats. He appears to have traded in the old family business for more lucrative endeavours.
To be continued…
Note: I lightly edited this piece a couple of days after I published it to make it read better.
[1] “United States, New York Land Records, 1630-1975 - New York > Conveyances 1846-1847, Vol. 480” digital image s.v. “Rachel De Lameter to James McCune Smith,” FamilySearch.org.
[2] ‘Death of an Aged Lady’, The Anglo-African, 24 January 1863.
[3] James McCune Smith, ‘From Our New York Correspondent [23 April 1859]’, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 29 April 1859. (NOTE: I edited the sentence that precedes this citation, removing the parenthetical ‘[he] erroneously recalled her as still a teenager when she was really about 22 by then, see below’ - The sentence I quoted here is worded so that it’s hard to read; though it appears to say that Malvina was a teenager when they moved, from the context, it appears he meant to write that she was still a teenager when they married, which is true.)
[4] John Pintard, Letters from John Pintard to His Daughter, Eliza Noel Pintard Davidson, 1816-1833, vol. IV 1832-1833 (New York: Printed for the New-York Historical Society, 1941), 44.
[5] James McCune Smith to Gerrit Smith, 25 January 1847, Gerrit Smith Papers, Syracuse University Libraries.
[6] John Doggett, Doggett’s New-York City Directory, for 1847 & 1848 (New York: John Doggett, Jr., 1847), 378.
[7] John Doggett, Doggett’s New-York City Directory, for 1846 and 1847 (New York: John Doggett, Jr., 1846), 331.
[8] Doggett, Doggett’s, 1847, 345.
[9] Henry Wilson and John F. Trow, Trow’s New-York City Directory. H. Wilson, Compiler. For 1853-1854 (New York: John F. Trow, 1853).
[10] John Doggett, Doggett’s New-York City Directory, for 1850-1851 (New York: John Doggett, Jr., 1850), 86 This one lists a Henry Butler selling oysters who lived at 34 City Hall Place, and a Henry H. Butler selling oysters and living at 42 Catherine. Henry Wilson and John F. Trow, Trow’s New-York City Directory. H. Wilson, Compiler. For the Year Ending May 1, 1856 (New York: John F. Trow, 1855), This one just lists Henry H. Butler selling oysters at 8 Catherine and living at 8 Island.
[11] John Doggett, Doggett’s New York City Street Directory, for 1851 (New York: John Doggett, Jr., 1851), 277.
[12] David Longworth, Longworth’s American Almanac, New-York Register, and City Directory (New York: David Longworth, 1804), 123.
[13] “New York Wills and Probate Records, 1659-1999, New York > Wills, Wills, Vol 088, 1843” digital image s.v. “Samuel Delamater (probate date 7 September 1843),” Ancestry.com’; La Fayette De La Mater, Genealogy of Descendants of Claude Le Maitre (Delamater) Who Came from France via Holland and Settled at New Netherland, Now New York, in 1652 (Albany: Joel Munsell’s Sons, 1882), 183.
[14] ‘Colored Men as Physicians’, Nemaha County Republican, 19 March 1885.
[15] Amy M. Cools, ‘The Life and Work of Dr. James McCune Smith (1813-1865)’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2021), 122, https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/38333.
[16] Gertrude A. Barber, ‘Deaths Taken from the New York Evening Post from April 23, 1855 to March 17, 1856 - Volume 32’ (1941), 77; Wilson and Trow, Trow’s, 1855, 218.
[17] “New York Probate Records, 1629-1971, Kings > Wills 1865-1866, Vol. 31” digital image s.v. “James McCune Smith,” FamilySearch.org.
[18] “United States, New York Land Records, 1630-1975 - Kings > Conveyances 1865 Vol 660-663,” digital image s.v. “John F. and Rhoda A. Glover to James McCune Smith,” FamilySearch.org.
[19] "United States, New York Land Records, 1630-1975 - New York > Conveyances 1865, Vol. 931," digital image s.v. "James McCune and Malvina Smith to John Henry Miller," FamilySearch.org.
[20] Henry Wilson and John F. Trow, Trow’s New-York City Directory, Compiled by H. Wilson. For the Year Ending May 1, 1866 (New York: John F. Trow, 1865), 678.
[21] Henry Wilson and John F. Trow, Trow’s New York City Directory, Compiled by H. Wilson. For the Year Ending May 1, 1868 (New York: John F. Trow, 1867), 720, 199, 334, 623.