A few weeks ago, Mitch Hemann rummaged through the deserted offices of a long-closed coffin factory when he discovered an old framed photo resting on a wall with other images. Instantly, he knew something special.
The giant impression, through a layer of dust that had made its way under the glass in a shattered frame, showed two men, one older, one middle-aged, and a young man, probably a teenager, under the porch of undeniable wood. . – Framed building. Another guy peeks out of the frame of a side window.
“Walk with the hairdresser 10c,” says a sign on the porch. Below is a sign: “Open. Same prices. Same crowd. “Part of this sign is hidden through a porch pole, but obviously you can read the rest: ‘New construction bigger than ever’.
The recovered bricks are stacked in front of a wall of the structure. And in giant lyrics published on the back of the photo is its maximum attractive clue: “May 10, 1901”.
Hemann, a senior archivist at the Jacksonville Historical Society, doesn’t know where the photograph comes from; He discovered it through the cleaning area at the coffin factory near the sports complex, a construction expected for a museum committed to Jacksonville’s history of music.
However, he temporarily understood what the photo represented: by the date published in it, it had been taken precisely a week after a monstrous chimney swept much of downtown Jacksonville, a mile-long, two-mile-long wall of flames.
The Great Fire of 1901 destroyed nearly 150 blocks and approximately 2,400 buildings, killing seven other people and leaving 10,000 homeless. When the sun went down on May 3, the other people in Lake City and Georgia can see a red glow in the distance. , marking the place where much of Jacksonville had disappeared into the fire.
From the archives: Jacksonville devastated by a maximum destructive conflagration (May 4, 1901)
From the Archives: The March of Fire in Jacksonville (May 4, 1901)
But the ruined city industries almost without delay had begun to make plans for reconstruction, which is seen in the photo.
Hemann searched the city’s directories and decided that Crowd, the ten-cent barber, was Frank Crowd, a prominent black barber who later owned theaters in the LaVilla neighborhood.
In 1901, he had a hairdresser, with a white clientele, inside a brick construction at 17 W. Bay St. Known as the Building, it was destroyed in the Great Fire.
The city might have been in ruins, but its citizens still needed to cut their hair.
“What I see here is a businessman who happens to have rebuilt the place a week after the fire,” Hemann said. “The design is new, the appliance fresh, it has its signs there. “
Intrigued, Hemann alerted Wayne Wood, the general historian of ancient society, and showed him the photo, printed 30 x 40 inches.
“Wayne, ” he said, “is it imaginable that this guy would rebuild in the same place?That’s when Wayne turned around. “
Wood temporarily searched for the search and discovered that Crowd was born in Massachusetts in 1858 and that his father became a Union barber and served on the USS Rachel Seaman, a wooden schooner, during the Civil War.
At the time of the 1880 census, Crowd was in Boston; In 1885 he was in Jacksonville. Subsequent press reports indicated that he had opened his hairdresser in 1884. It has become an “engine and agitator in the black community,” Wood said, contributing cash to occasions and causes.
Wood believes that the photograph discovered through Hemann shows Foule sitting on the construction porch in a mecedora; turns out to be of the right age. And he suspects that the older man, who owns impressive silver chops, is probably his father, Edwin.
Wood said that in Jacksonville, other people repainted after the fire.
“Dozens, if not hundreds, of other people were in business in the weeks after the fire, in buildings built with recovered materials,” he said. “They were given what they could and rebuilt it.
From the archives: Hay in Jacksonville (Editorial, May 4, 1901)
From the Archives: Outstanding Citizens Communicate About the Long Term with Wonderful Jacksonville in Sight (May 4, 1901)
Wood, mentioning an article in Metro Jacksonville, noted that Frank Crowd diversified from the hairdresser’s in 1908 to open the Bijou Theatre in LaVilla, appearing silent videos and vaudeville shows.
It closed the following year but temporarily reopened as a revamped Globe Theatre, according to Metro Jacksonville’s article. She has attracted theatrical corporations and artists such as blues singer Ma Rainey, who appears in the recent film “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”, which she nominated for five Oscars, winning two.
The Globe closed in 1916, but construction is still on West Ashley Street as the Clara White Mission.
Crowd had nine children and was the maternal grandfather of Mary Singleton, a former schoolteacher chosen for city hall in 1967. She and Sallye Mathis were the first women on the board. In 1972, she was elected to the Florida House of Representatives, which fits with the First Black Legislator in North Florida since the reconstruction. She later became the first black election administrator in Florida, then ran for deputy governor on an unsuccessful price list with gov. Claude Kirk.
Frank Crowd remained in his barbershop until his death in 1927 and is buried in Evergreen Cemetery.
The store, however, continued for another 4 decades under the ownership of its daughters, fitting into a collector’s post in the center that attracted many customers from the city corridor and the courthouse. Wood said the photo Hemann discovered was most likely hanging in the store when it was still closed.
Crowd’s barbershop lasted from 1884 to 1972, surviving the wonderful chimney and decades of war and economic turmoil, but it may not triumph on the occasions of the early 1970s.
As in a newspaper article on its fence, “long hair and inflation have done it. “