The Wilmington Taylors

The US Postal Service recently announced that its popular Black Heritage series will continue in 2015 with the release of a Forever® stamp honoring architect and educator Robert Robinson Taylor (1868–1942), who helped expand opportunities for African Americans in fields that had largely been closed to them. He was also the son of Henry Taylor, a slave carpenter who helped build the Bellamy Mansion. The stamp's release date will be announced soon.

In describing the distinguished lineage of the Taylor family of Wilmington, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. finds it difficult to recall a black family tree with more “firsts” in African-American history, starting in the depths of slavery.

Arguably the most notable among them is Robert Robinson Taylor, born here in 1868. He was the first African American to graduate from MIT and one of the first professionally trained black architects in the United States. As described by architectural historian Ellen Weiss, he forged a long career as an architect at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and a close friendship with the school’s founder Booker T. Washington. In 1943, shortly after Robert’s sudden death in 1942, a Wilmington public housing complex formerly called New Brooklyn Homes was renamed for Robert Robinson Taylor. In 2015, a Forever stamp by the USPS brings perpetual national prominence to this Wilmington native.

New Brooklyn Homes, now known as Robert R. Taylor Estates, is a 48 unit multi-family development located on North 4th Street in Wilmington. During the 1890s while an instructor at Tuskegee Institute, Taylor created plans for wooden schools and cottages for poor black families throughout Alabama with the goal of providing better housing than tumbled-down log cabins and rough tenant shacks and thereby encouraging healthful living and community pride.

The Brooklyn Neighborhood at the intersection of North 4th & Red Cross Streets was originally settled in the mid-19th century. It was physically isolated by the railroad cut with access to the "other side of the tracks" by bridges at North 4th, 5th and 6th Streets. By the 1890s, the lower end of North 4th had become Brooklyn's commercial center, with several grocers, cobblers, bakers and eating houses and dry goods dealers. The majority of the population at that time was a mixture of Germans, Russian Jews, Chinese, black and white unskilled labor and railroad workers.

Henry Taylor among Bellamy builders
The Taylor that’s most relevant to us at the Bellamy Mansion is Robert’s dad, Henry, born near Fayetteville in 1823. Fathered by his white master Angus Taylor and an enslaved woman who probably belonged to Angus as well, Henry was so skilled in his trade as a carpenter and contractor that his father allowed him to travel widely throughout his home state of North Carolina, pursuing his trade, in defiance of the restrictive conventions of slavery. Henry moved to Wilmington, where he became a carpenter-builder as well as forming a mercantile business with a white ship owner. According to NCSU’s North Carolina Architects & Builders in a description by Catherine Bishir, Beverly Tetterton and Ellen Weiss: Henry Taylor was one of many free and enslaved men of color who participated in Wilmington's city-wide building boom. 

Henry Taylor (1823-1891), a slave carpenter, was among the black artisans who built the Bellamy Mansion. Photo courtesy of New Hanover County Museum, Wright Collection.

Family tradition states that he was one of the carpenters who erected and finished the Bellamy Mansion in 1859-1861. Taylor's role was carried through family memories, and in 1999 his granddaughter Gladys Whiteman Baskerville and her extended family held her 100th birthday celebration at the mansion to honor the family legacy. After the war, Taylor operated a grocery business on Nutt Street while continuing in the building business. In 1868 he received $1,800 for constructing the Hemenway School and improving the schoolyard. Active in civic life, Taylor was a member of Giblem Masonic Lodge, the second black Masonic lodge in the state; he served on the finance committee to erect the lodge building in 1871, and it is probable that he was involved in construction of the building, which still stands. He was a founding member of Chestnut Street Presbyterian Church and was active in the Republican Party. He was buried in Pine Forest Cemetery.

The Taylor Family Tree
Henry and his wife Emily lived at 112 North 8th Street in a home that Henry built for the family, including their four children—John Edward, Anna Maria (Whiteman), Sarah Louise (Shober), and Robert Robinson—all of whom distinguished themselves.

John Edward Taylor remained in Wilmington and became a prosperous businessman and the first black man appointed Deputy Collector of Customs in the city, a position he held for 25 years. Anna Maria attended Howard University, as did her future husband, Dr. James Francis Shober, the first black physician with an M. D. degree to practice in North Carolina; a native of Winston-Salem, he spent his career in Wilmington. Sarah Louise Taylor likewise attended Howard University and married John Henry Whiteman, a prominent Wilmington businessman.

Robert Robinson Taylor's son Robert Rochon Taylor became an important corporate and civic figure in Chicago, for whom the large Chicago public housing complex, Robert Taylor Homes (completed in 1962), was named. Among Henry Taylor's descendants through this branch of the family is his great-great-great granddaughter Valerie Jarrett, a civic and political leader in Chicago who in 2009 became White House Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama.