Sites Associated with James McCune Smith and Family in New York City #6
The House at 29 Leonard Street
Continuing to track James McCune Smith sites in New York City, I leave where the Smith family home was at 15 North Moore Street and head south on Varick. There are clouds rolling in, swallowing the tops of buildings as I walk. At the corner where Varick Street, West Broadway, and Leonard Street meet, I turn right on Leonard and very quickly get to my destination. This short walk traces the route, in reverse, that McCune Smith would have walked with his two children in arms and his wife at his side when they moved from this house to the 15 North Moore one in 1847. I arrive at a large red brick building on my right which now encompasses #29 and #31 Leonard. It’s being renovated, with the whole bottom floor gutted.
McCune Smith lived at 29 Leonard St from about 1840 to May 1847. This red brick building is not the original one from McCune Smith’s time. According to an ad from 1836 listing it for sale, the house at 29 Leonard was roomy, featuring two stories, a brick façade, a ‘stone stoop and iron railing,’ and a kitchen with ‘many conveniences.’ It was described as being suitable for ‘one or more families.’[1] It probably looked a lot like one of the famous old two-story brick houses on Harrison Street, pictured here in Ephemeral New York, a blog that features wonderful photos of New York City architecture.
Starting at least ten years before McCune Smith moved in, 29 Leonard St was an African American boarding house; it was advertised as such in 1829, a ‘healthy and pleasant’ ‘situation’ where residents would be made ‘comfortable and happy.’[2] After McCune Smith moved in sometime in 1840, boarders appeared to be living there then as well. He’s first listed at this address in an 1840 NYC directory, as an M.D., with his name misspelled as ‘James McEwan Smith.’[3] The US Census for that year also lists a ‘Jas. M. Smith’ (‘Jas’ being a common abbreviation for ‘James’) living in the Fifth Ward (29 Leonard was in the Fifth Ward) in a household with six other people. There were seven people living there in all: besides Jas M. Smith, there were two ‘free white persons,’ a young woman and a boy under 5, and five ‘free colored persons:’ two women (one young, one middle-aged), one man between the ages of 24 and 35 (McCune Smith was about 27 at the time), and a boy and a girl both under 10. One of the members of the household was also ticked off under the category ‘Learned Professional Engineers.’[4] That appears to be a general category for skilled professionals with a university degree, rather than referring to ‘engineer’ in the more specific senses as we might understand it today. That Jas M. Smith is listed in the census as a head of household; if it is our Jas M. Smith, it appears that he rented out the house and took boarders, rather than living as a boarder in a house headed by someone else.
Also, if it’s our Jas M Smith, the middle-aged woman (listed in the age category 36-54) in the household was likely Lavinia. Though Lavinia would have been about 57, this probably refers to her. As I’ve frequently discovered, it was not at all uncommon for census-takers to have been off by a few years when recording people’s ages back then, and all other census entries for McCune Smith show Lavinia living in his household. We just can’t be quite as sure with the 1840 census because prior to 1850, federal and state censuses only listed heads of households by name. McCune Smith was not yet married nor yet had children, so the fact that two younger women and three children also lived in the house also points to the older women being Lavinia. The younger women were likely widows or otherwise single mothers, so for respectability’s sake, McCune Smith would almost certainly not take in single female boarders without his mother being there.
In 1841, the house at 29 Leonard St was again advertised for sale. Real estate ads for the property show it was being offered at $4,300, with the current rent being paid by its tenants as $400 in total, excluding taxes.[5] McCune Smith continued to live there, however, as New York City directories reveal.[6] There’s no record of him buying the house or of selling it later, so it appears that if the new house changed ownership, they kept McCune Smith and his household as tenants.
At least part of McCune Smith’s household changed sometime in 1842 (or perhaps as late as early 1843) when McCune Smith married Malvina Barnett.[7] (Their marriage record does not survive.) She was a student at Rutgers Female Institute until at least 1841.[8] Rutgers was a school ahead of its time: it offered a rigorous liberal arts and scientific education for girls and young women. But it was not so progressive that it was racially integrated; rather, it appears that they did not know the light-skinned Malvina had non-European ancestry. (Her brother’s nonwhite ancestry went similarly unnoticed when he attended medical school in the mid-1800s.)[9]
Malvina didn’t graduate from Rutgers, though she did very well there. It’s possible that she left because she and McCune Smith were making plans to marry. Born about 1825, she was only about 17 when they married.[10] He later wrote, jokingly, that while she ‘was yet a slender person and meek, in her teens’ when they married, she, like most ‘New York girls make a mental reservation in the “obey” in regard to the first of May.’[11] (See the previous installment of this newsletter for the significance of the first of May and Malvina’s taking charge that day.) McCune Smith’s use of the word ‘meek’ was evidently tongue-in-cheek; his writings suggest that her strong will and independence of mind were qualities he admired and enjoyed about her.
McCune Smith and Malvina’s first two children were born when they lived at 29 Leonard St. Amy was born on 29 December 1843; James Ward followed sometime in 1845. (See an earlier installment of this newsletter for more about Amy, James, and the other Smith children.) The Smith family – under McCune Smith’s name, at least – continued to be listed at the 29 Leonard St house in New York City directories until 1846.[12]
McCune Smith, Malvina, their two children, and Lavinia did not live at 29 Leonard on their own in the years between their marriage and their move to 15 North Moore. There’s no evidence whether any or all of those that had (most likely) lived in the house with McCune Smith stayed or moved out. But there is one person who can be confirmed to have shared the house with the Smith family: a ‘colored’ dressmaker named Maria Jeantegeau. She’s also listed at 29 Leonard in NYC directories for 1844, ’45, and ’46.[13] If Lavinia was indeed a tailor, as we’ve considered in a previous installment of this newsletter, she may even have been a mentor or a teacher to Jeantegeau. If so, she struck out on her own when the Smiths moved out of that house in 1847. She moved down the street to 13 Leonard that year.[14]
The last evidences we have of the Smith’s living at the 29 Leonard St house before their move to 15 North Moore St are in a couple of letters. In the first, written on 25 January 1847, McCune Smith, on behalf of Malvina and himself, invited their friends Gerrit and Elizabeth Smith, and their daughter and son-in-law, to have tea with them at their home the next day. He addressed the letter from 29 Leonard.[15]
McCune Smith wrote another letter from the same address on 31 March 1847 to John Wakefield Francis. [16] That occasion was not such a happy one. The letter was written to Francis as head of the Committee on Admissions for the newly formed New York Academy of Medicine. Though McCune Smith was formally recommended for admission as a Fellow by two colleagues – most were recommended by just one – the Committee dragged its feet on approving it. McCune Smith wrote this letter to Francis to see what the holdup was. While Francis talked very politely and hemmed and hawed, and McCune Smith responded with equal politeness, as well as patience and understanding that not everyone was yet immediately comfortable with racially integrated institutions, the Committee and the Academy never ended up approving his admission. McCune Smith was evidently fairly sure that the Academy would come through – it was one thing for politicians and everyday bigots and others to treat him unjustly on account of race. It was quite another for an Academy made up of his fellow physicians, many of whom he worked with regularly, to act in such a petty, ignorant fashion. As his later writings reveal, he remained embittered by that professional betrayal.[17]
[1] ‘Public Sales (29 Leonard Street)’, Commercial Advertiser, 27 January 1836.
[2] ‘Boarding (29 Leonard Street)’, Freedom’s Journal, 28 March 1829.
[3] Thomas Longworth, Longworth’s American Almanac, New-York Register, and City Directory (New York: Thomas Longworth, 1840), 581.
[4] 1840 United States Census, New York, New York County, New York, digital image s.v. “Jas. M. Smith” (Ward 5), Ancestry.com.
[5] ‘Public Sales (29 Leonard Street)’, New-York Commercial Advertiser, 12 August 1841, 2; ‘Commercial Record: New York Auction Sales (29 Leonard Street)’, New-York Commercial Advertiser, 24 August 1841.
[6] Thomas Longworth, Longworth’s American Almanac, New-York Register, and City Directory (New York: Thomas Longworth, 1841), 650; John Doggett, The New-York City Directory, for 1842 and 1843 (New York: John Doggett, 1842), 215; Thomas Longworth, Longworth’s American Almanac, New-York Register, and City Directory (New York: Thomas Longworth, 1843), 313.
[7] Robert Hamilton, ‘Dr. James McCune Smith’, The Anglo-African 5, no. 13 (9 December 1865): 2; Family Bible of Antoinette Martignoni, Great-Granddaughter of James McCune Smith, n.d.
[8] ‘Rutgers Female Institute’, The New World 1, no. 10 (8 August 1840): 145–47; ‘Rutgers Female Institute: Anniversary Commencement’, The New World 3, no. 5 (31 July 1841): 68–69; Rutgers Female Institute, Celebration of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Rutgers Female Institute (New York: Rutgers Female Institute, 1864), 28.
[9] Amy M. Cools, ‘Roots: Tracing the Family History of James McCune and Malvina Barnett Smith, 1783-1937, Part 2’, Journal of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society 37 (2020): 54.
[10] 1850 United States Census, New York, New York County, New York, digital image s.v. “James McCune Smith.” FamilySearch.org.
[11] James McCune Smith, ‘From Our New York Correspondent [23 April 1859]’, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 29 April 1859.
[12] John Doggett, The New-York City Directory, for 1844 & 1845 (New York: John Doggett, 1844), 322; John Doggett, Doggett’s New-York City Directory, for 1845 & 1846 (New York: John Doggett, Jr., 1845), 336; John Doggett, Doggett’s New-York City Directory, for 1846 and 1847 (New York: John Doggett, Jr., 1846), 362.
[13] Doggett, Doggett’s NYC Directory, 1844-45, 184; Doggett, Doggett’s, 1845, 191; Doggett, Doggett’s, 1846, 207.
[14] John Doggett, Doggett’s New-York City Directory, for 1847 & 1848 (New York: John Doggett, Jr., 1847), 217.
[15] James McCune Smith to Gerrit Smith, 25 January 1847’, Gerrit Smith Papers, Syracuse University Libraries.
[16] ‘James McCune Smith to John W. Francis, Esq. M.D. [31 March 1847]’, in Committee on Admissions, Minutes 1847-1885 (New York, 1885), 19–20.
[17] James McCune Smith, ‘Chess’, The Anglo-African Magazine, September 1859, 274–75, fn 274.