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2009 Archaeology Field
School
In Summer 2009 the IUPUI
Archaeology Field School will conduct excavations at a site that
includes Madam Walker’s home and the neighboring store and Walker
Company office that she first rented when she moved to Indianapolis.
Madam Walker’s company remained in the neighborhood for more than a
half-century, and the Theater built in her honor continues to serve as a
reminder of her national prominence, but she was one of many people who
made their homes in the neighborhood over more than 125 years, and many
of her neighbors worked at the very same ambitions that drove Madam
Walker. The archaeological project provides an opportunity to examine
the Walker Company’s industrial operation and Madam Walker’s home while
it will illuminate nearly a century of residents who lived in this
block.
The Archaeology Field School (Anthropology P405)
is offered most Summers and is open to any undergraduate student for
four to six credits. The course is offered during Summer
semester I, which begins May 13 and ends Wednesday June 24.
You do not need to be an Anthropology student or have any archaeological
coursework or experience to take the class. Students are trained
in field excavation methodology, public interpretation, laboratory
analysis, and archaeological theory. Students learn to identify
nineteenth- and twentieth-century material culture, excavate historic
urban deposits, and work actively with many visitors and our partners in
the Ransom Place Neighborhood Association. For registration
details, enrolled IUPUI students can contact the Registrar's
Office. Visiting students can get details on credit transfer
on the Registrar's
Visiting Students page. See the
field school syllabus
for the course requirements.
Volunteers are welcome to work alongside field
school students. We will start accepting volunteers the week of
May 25th. If you would like to volunteer over the summer,
please email Paul Mullins or Lewis
Jones or call (317-274-9847) for details.
Those who would like a detailed scholarly
background on Madam Walker should consult
On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker (A'Lelia
Bundles, Scribner 2001). The
Madam C.J. Walker web page
includes essential biographical background on Madam Walker. For
those visiting Indianapolis or the archaeology site, the
Madame Walker Theatre
Center was opened by Madam Walker's daughter A'Lelia Walker in
December, 1927, and it today hosts a rich range of musical, scholarly,
and cultural programs and is
open for
tours by appointment.
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| Above: In 1887 the
three homes on North West Street had been standing about 10
years. In this view North West Street is at the top (i.e.,
current-day Martin Luther King Jr. Street), and Madam Walker's
future home sat in the middle of the three homes. The rear
yards were at this point relatively open spaces, with the
exceptions of outhouses along the alley line at 342 and 354 North
West Street and the large two-story stable behind the Abel and
Harriet Davis home in between. |
Life along the Color Line on
North West Street
The first occupants of the
home that Madam Walker would eventually purchase in 1911 were Abel and
Harriet Davis, who built the house in about 1871-1875. Abel Davis was
born in New Hampshire in about 1828, and he married Harriet Grimes in
New Hampshire in 1858. Sometime between 1863 and 1867 Abel and Harriet
Davis moved to Indianapolis, where they appeared in the city directory
on the east side of West Street in 1867 (i.e., the side of the street
opposite the archaeological site). Abel was then managing the firm
Baxter and Davis with Peter D. Baxter, a grocery and produce dealer on
West Washington Street. In 1875 the Davis household first appeared in
the city directory at the future Walker residence. The home
directly to the north--which Madam Walker rented in 1910-1911 prior to
moving into the former Davis house--was home to Margaret Espy in 1875,
and that home was built at about the same time as the Abel's residence.
Born in Pennsylvania in about 1801, Espy first appeared in an
Indianapolis primary record in 1850, when she appeared in the federal
census. Between 1871 and 1875 she moved to the North West
Street home, apparently at about the same time as the Davises moved into
their new home, but Espy was gone by 1880 and was buried at Crown Hill
Cemetery in 1887. A parade of neighbors moved into the homes on
each side of the Davises over three decades, but the Davis family lived for more than 30 years in the home
that Madam Walker purchased in 1911. Abel and Harriet Davis last appeared on
North West Street in 1906, though they may have remained there as late
as 1909; Abel apparently died by 1910, when the census recorded Harriet Davis living on Indiana Avenue.
In 1910, CJ and Sarah
Walker and their housekeeper Linnie Allen were renting the home at
644-646 North West Street, which had once been Margaret Espy's house and
had been used as a combined store and residential space since the
late-19th century. The Walkers were among the earliest African-American
residents on North West Street, a neighborhood whose ethnic makeup
changed quite radically in the first decade of the 20th
century. In 1900 six households were listed in the federal census as
residents in the archaeological project area, which included two doubles
and two single-family residences, and all were White. In 1906, the
first Black resident in the project area was Harry C. Clark, an
Illinois-born cook living in the double south of Madam Walker’s future
home. His neighbor in the double was William A. Davidson, a White
Canadian born to a Scottish father and English mother, and while most of
Davidson’s neighbors could not claim such ethnic diversity they all were
classed in the census as White. Four years later, though, only one
resident was White, and most of the surrounding blocks had also become
overwhelmingly Black. In 1910, that last White resident was Oel Buck,
who was managing a candy shop on Indiana Avenue, and he and his wife
Annie had been living in a home on the alley at the rear of 644-646
North West Street since about 1904. The Buck family stayed in the home
until 1912, but when they moved in 1913 the surrounding block was
uniformly Black.
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Much of the near-Westside became predominately Black
around the same moment, fueled by the vast number of African Americans
fleeing the South in a mass displacement commonly referred to as the Great Migration.
Between 1910 and 1920 Indianapolis' Black population increased
from 21,816 to 34,690, and a vast number of these newcomers came
from the upper South, especially Kentucky. While the largest
numbers of African-American migrants came in the 20th century, a steady
stream had been arriving in Indianapolis since the Civil War, and by
1900 many of those residents had settled along and adjoining Indiana
Avenue, so the 20th-century arrivals often settled in the same
neighborhoods as Madam Walker. In some other corners of the near-Westside, though, ethnic
White majorities including Irish Americans and Greeks hung on well into
the 1930s and after World War II. Nevertheless, the neighborhoods north
and south of Indiana Avenue tended to become predominately Black from
the late 1890s, and by World War I most of the neighborhoods north of
Michigan Street were overwhelmingly African American. The labor
opportunities these newcomers found were exceptionally
limited. As in many communities, many African Americans
entered domestic service, much as Madam Walker had herself
done. In 1910, for instance, Madam Walker's neighbor Annie
Parker and her boarder Clara Williams were identified as doing day
work and cooking for private families. Madam Walker herself
had a live-in housekeeper Linnie Allen in 1910; while many of
these service laborers eventually secured other work, many also
spent their lives in such work. A 1923 study of
African-American domestic service suggested that Indianapolis'
African-American service laborers were especially well-educated in
comparison to other cities: of 387 African Americans doing
domestic labor in Indianapolis, 43% had attended school through at
least the fifth grade, a figure that was much higher than
contemporary cities, which were dominated by laborers with significantly
less education. This likely was a reflection of the very
limited laboring opportunities for women of color in early 20th
century Indianapolis. Those women who did domestic service
faced physically challenging and often dehumanizing working
conditions: More than half of the Indianapolis
households employing African American laundresses in 1922 did not
have washing machines, so these African-American laundresses
labored at a task Madam Walker herself had once conducted using
much the same technology she had once used (from Elizabeth Ross
Haynes, Negroes in Domestic Service in the United States, Journal
of Negro History October 1923). |
| Above: In 1898,
the Sanborn Insurance map showed the three homes along North West
Street including the home at 640 North West that eventually became
Madam Walker's residence in 1911. Since the 1887 map of the
same property, a double had been added along the alley at 636
North West Street and another at 644-646 North West Street. |
| The Indianapolis Star
noted on May 6, 1911 that Harriet G. Davis sold a 40-by-155 foot lot “to
Sarah Walker ... [on the] west side of West Street, north of Indiana
avenue" for $3500 (right). Madam Walker apparently began to quickly renovate
the home, adding two rooms and a bath but not changing the structure's
existing footprint. Indeed, the two-story home looked much the
same on a 1914 Sanborn insurance map as it had in 1898, but Madam Walker
clearly significantly renovated the interior upon purchasing the home.
On July 2, 1911 the Indianapolis Star’s “News of the Colored
Folks” column indicated that “The beautiful and recently remodeled home
of Mr. and Mrs. C J Walker on North West Street was thrown open to their
friends Tuesday evening for a housewarming. One hundred and fifty
persons attended. The house was decorated with palms and cut flowers.
Music was furnished by a harpist. Among the out of town guests were
Mrs. Walker B. Bond and Mrs. [Agnes] Prosser [CJ Walker’s sister] of
Louisville Ky. Mr. and Mrs. Walker received many valuable presents.”
Walker did add an outbuilding at the rear of the lot in about 1912 that
was identified in a 1914 map as “salve mixing,” replacing an earlier
stable that had at one point included an upstairs living space.
After acquiring the neighboring home she had once rented at 644-646
North West Street, she converted it into a salon. The alley home Oel
and Annie Buck had lived in at the back of that lot was dismantled in
about 1913 and replaced by 1914 with a garage, certainly for Madam
Walker’s car. Even after Madam Walker's death her home and
Indianapolis factory continued to attract attention; in 1923, for
instance, a Journal of Negro History article on African-American
business surveyed Madam Walker's firm and noted that "A very fine
home office building recently constructed in Indianapolis gives further
evidence of the impression which this enterprise has made in the
business world." The salve mixing building continued to be used into the
1950s, and the garage was eventually turned over to a manufacturing
space for the firm as well. |
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| Above: On May 6, 1911
the Indianapolis Star's real estate column included this notice of
Harriet Grimes Davis' sale of 640 North West Street to Madam
Walker. |
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A September 6, 1912 line in
the Indianapolis Star's "News of the Courts" column noted that
Sarah Walker was requesting a divorce from CJ Walker, who she had
married in 1906, but she would continue to use the moniker Madam CJ
Walker for the remainder of her career. Madam Walker's ambitions to
continually expand her company led her to New York City, and the
commonplace injustices of everyday racism in Indianapolis likely fueled
her decision to eventually leave Indianapolis. Madam Walker lived
in the North West Street home until January, 1916, when she moved to New
York City. She appeared as the resident of the home in the 1916 city
directory, but by then she had begun to live in her new Harlem home even
though her firm continued to operate from the North West Street address.
Walker eventually constructed an even more fabulous home at
Irvington-on-Hudson 20 miles north of Manhattan known as Villa Lewaro, a
name coined by Enrico Caruso that took the first two letters from the
name of the Madam's daughter Lelia Walker Robinson. Yet by that
point Madam Walker's health had begun to deteriorate, and in May 1919
she died at Villa Lewaro, attended by Dr. Joseph Ward who had hosted her
on her arrival in Indianapolis nine years earlier.
Madam Walker was certainly the
most famous resident of this stretch of North West Street and lived in
its most stately home, but she was surrounded by many neighbors who
lived in much more modest homes. When the project area appeared
in the 1887 Sanborn Insurance map, it identified a double to the south
of Madam Walker's future home and the Espy home to the north. In
the 1890s another double was built on the rear of the lot at 636-638
North West Street. Much of the near-Westside had become densely
occupied by the turn of the century, and many home owners and landlords
subdivided large residences into multiple units, expanded existing
homes, converted stables into homes, and built onto alleys, just as the
residents did at 636-638 North West Street. While the homes along North West Street were
quite substantial residences, the alley homes were much smaller
buildings that were vastly less well-appointed than Madam Walker's home;
at 636-638 North West, for instance, the large out building in the yard in 1898
was likely an outhouse, and the structure remained there until World War
II. Outhouses had once sat along the rear lot
line of the homes at 636-638 and 644-646 when those homes were first
built, but the model genteel homes along North West Street quickly
secured sewer connections. Many neighbors in the blocks around Madam Walker--even
within 50 yards of her own home--would continue to have uneven utility services and live in
quite modest homes throughout the neighborhood's history.
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| Above: The
archaeological project area is outlined in red in this 1916 map of
the neighborhood. The light red structures were businesses,
which included the building at 644-646 North West Street as well
as a string of enterprises along Indiana Avenue near the base of
this map. |
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The Walker Company remained a
profitable firm long after Madam Walker's passing, and her palatial North West Street home continued as the firm's
offices and then as a private residence and insurance office even as the firm's factory and
store continued in business in its back yard and in the neighboring lot.
By the late 1920s the Walker residence was home to the household of Judge and Ella Duncan. Born
in Kentucky in June, 1884, Judge Duncan married Ella Walker on August 3,
1922. In 1920 Ella Walker appeared in the census as a divorced
head of household living on West Michigan Street with Judge Duncan as
one of her two boarders. She had been married to a man named George
Walker, but he does not appear to have had a relationship to Madam
Walker. The Duncans lived in the home into the 1930s but had moved by
1940. Madam Walker's
former home storefront at 644-646 North West Street was a beauty salon
being managed by Mary F. Oden in 1940, with the other side being home to a feed store. The firm continued to have factory
buildings in the back yards of the two homes, and Madam Walker's home
was an insurance office as well as a residence to Lowrey McClain. Yet
between 1950 and 1956 the Walker factory buildings were dismantled, and
the back yard become an open lot. The Walker home itself was last
listed as a residence in 1965, appearing vacant in both 1964 and 1965,
and it was apparently razed soon after.
The archaeology field school
will be in the field at Madam Walker's home site from mid-May through
late June. Visitors are welcome to come see the excavations in
progress, and reports on the field findings will be posted on this page
as the summer progresses.
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| Above: In 1950, the
rear yard of the structures at 640 and 646-648 North West Street
continued to have buildings associated with the Walker Company,
identified here as "salve mixing" and
"storage." The
Gibraltar Industrial Life Insurance Company had offices in the former Madam Walker home at 640 North West, and
Maxine Beard lived in the home. |
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