Getting to Know Adeline Lawson Graham (1856-1930)
A Biographical Inquiry in Three Parts: PART One
Philip Ruth, Research Coordinator
January 23, 2023
I was introduced to Adeline Lawson Graham while researching the Wesleyan AME log church on Bellefonte’s E. Logan Street (see my September 9, 2022 blog post). In an 1829 deed, I found a “colored black man” named Isaac Lawson identified as the owner of a property adjoining the future site of the church. A search of Ancestry.com’s database for nineteenth-century Bellefonte residents by that name turned up an 1860 census entry for a 60-year-old black gardener presiding over a household in south Bellefonte that included a three-year-old Adeline Lawson. I then located a death certificate for an Adeline Lawson Graham reportedly born in Bellefonte in January 1856 to Isaac Lawson and an unidentified mother. The certificate further identified Adeline as the wife of Henry Graham (who survived her), and indicated that on the day of her death—October 11, 1930—Adeline was a resident of Emporium, Cameron County, Pennsylvania, about 50 miles northwest of Bellefonte. The certificate also noted that Adeline’s remains had been taken to Bellefonte for burial in the Union Cemetery.
That information sent me to Findagrave.com, where I found a record of Adeline’s interment in Bellefonte’s Union Cemetery. The entry included a photo of Adeline’s gravestone (sadly toppled), as well as a scanned image of an obituary clipped from an unidentified newspaper. The obituary read as follows:
GRAHAM.—Mrs. Henry Graham, an esteemed colored woman who spent most of her young womanhood in Bellefonte, died at her home in Emporium, on Sunday, as the result of general debility, aged about 74 years.
Her maiden name was Adeline Lawson and she was born in slavery in the South. As a young woman she was brought to Bellefonte by the Dr. Wilson family and for a number of years was a servant in the Wilson household. She later accepted employment in the home of former Governor Andrew G. Curtin where she remained until her marriage to Henry Graham, when she went to Emporium, where she lived until her death. She had no children and her only survivor, as far as known, is her husband. The remains were brought to Bellefonte and funeral services held in the A.M.E. church at 2:30 o’clock Tuesday afternoon by Rev. W. E. Gibbons, burial being made in the Union cemetery.
There were so many intriguing aspects to that brief life-review that I couldn’t resist delving more deeply into Adeline’s story, beginning with her reported January 1856 birth in Bellefonte to Isaac Lawson and an unidentified mother.
Across a gamut of nineteenth-century records, I found references to only one black Centre Countian named Isaac Lawson. He was the man I had seen enumerated in the 1860 census of Bellefonte as a 60-year-old gardener. Ten years earlier, he had told a Bellefonte census enumerator that he was 50 years old and had been born in Maryland, suggesting his birth into servitude around 1800. How long Isaac endured enforced poverty and state-sanctioned violence in his birthplace, and the means by which he was freed from those conditions, are not a matter of record. He must have made his way northward to Bellefonte well before August 1829, as in the latter month he acquired the western half of town lot 78, fronting 30 feet on E. Bishop Street, and swooping 200 feet southward and uphill to E. Logan Street. Isaac paid the executors of James Harris’ will $25 for the lot, which was characterized in the associated deed as vacant. That deed had placed Isaac on my radar through its description of the grantee as a “colored black man.”
I later learned that, by another deed drafted on that date, the executors of James Harris’ will had conveyed the eastern half of Lot 78 to a “colored” Bellefonte resident named John Cornish, also in consideration of $25. The concurrent conveyances to Cornish and Lawson still represent the earliest acquisitions of Centre County real estate by persons of color that I have thus far encountered. Tax assessment records compiled later in 1829 showed Cornish and Lawson each obliged to pay $0.20 as property tax, though only Cornish was additionally identified in the assessment ledger as “Negro.”
On a federal census schedule completed the following year (1830), Isaac Lawson was identified as a free black man between the ages of 23 and 36 (i.e., born during the period 1795-1806). He was living in southern Bellefonte with a free black woman aged 36-54 (her name was not recorded on the schedule; I have come to believe she was the woman named “Sarah” recorded with Isaac in the 1850 census enumeration as a 60-year-old black female born in Maryland). The progression of the census enumerator as he walked from house to house in the summer of 1830 strongly suggests that Isaac and his partner had by then taken up residence in a recently constructed house on the western half of Lot 78. Their free black next-door neighbors to the east (on the eastern half of Lot 78) were John Cornish and his family. Enumerated immediately after the Lawsons were the households of John Brown (two free black persons), James Butler (one free black person), and Richard Thomas (three free black persons). These records appear to reflect the emergence of Bellefonte’s first black community on the hillside south of E. Bishop Street. In a letter published in the Democratic Watchman in 1924, a white former resident of Bellefonte recalled that in the 1840s he and other locals referred to that section as “N- – – – – town Hill.”
As I noted in my September 9, 2022 blog post, Isaac Lawson’s property between E. Bishop and E. Logan Streets was mentioned in a March 29, 1838 deed whereby Bellefonte barber John B. Coxe conveyed the southern end of the eastern half of Lot 78 to “trustees of the coloured Weslayan Methodist Episcopal Church” (through a series of prior deeds, John and Mary Ann Cornish had conveyed the eastern half of Lot 78 to Dennis McCafferty in 1829, McCafferty had conveyed it to ironmaster Abraham S. Valentine in 1832, and Valentine had assigned it to Coxe in 1834). Later in 1838 and into 1839, the first Wesleyan AME church was built on the plot of ground conveyed by Coxe to the trustees. That “hewn-log” structure stood on the north side of E. Logan Street, beside Isaac Lawson’s property and within earshot of his residence.
I expected to find an entry for Isaac Lawson among the heads-of-households recorded in Bellefonte during the 1840 census, but my search of census schedules turned up no person with a name similar to Isaac’s. I also came up empty-handed when I looked for similar names elsewhere in Centre County. I returned to Isaac’s entry in 1850 census records, and noted that he had been enumerated in Bellefonte as Isaac “Laughlin,” a 50-year-old laborer and Maryland native. He was head of an all-black household on E. Bishop Street that also comprised his presumed wife Sarah Lawson (age 60), Sarah “Boston” (14), Rebecca Gilmore (2), and Rosetta Gilmore (2 months) (I place “Boston” in quotes because I believe this 14-year-old Sarah was actually Isaac and Sarah Lawson’s daughter Sarah Lawson, whom later records indicate had been born around 1836). The Lawson household was enumerated in August 1850 immediately prior to an all-black household headed by Sarah Hutchinson and additionally comprising Lewis Mills (age 22, father of future Bellefonte barber William Hutchinson Mills) and Lewis’ brothers Thomas (21), Edward (18), and William (13).
Later census records also enabled me to identify Mary Rebecca and Rosetta Gilmore (housemates of Isaac and Sarah Lawson in the summer of 1850) as daughters of Mary Ann Gilmore, who was enumerated in August 1850 several blocks to the north, living and working as a domestic servant in the household of Quaker ironmaster George Valentine and his wife Mary (née Downing). Mary Ann Gilmore told a visiting enumerator that she was 29 years old and had been born in Virginia. Judging from subsequent enumerations in which she reported a variety of birth years and locations, Mary Ann might have been guessing at her age and place of birth. I suspect that her daughters Mary Rebecca and Rosetta were not living with her in the summer of 1850 because it was not conducive and/or permitted to have them underfoot in the Valentine home. That home, by the way, was in the recently constructed western half of a large stone duplex still standing at 141 W. High Street. A note posted in a virtual walking tour of Bellefonte states that the eastern half of the building “was built in 1795 by Lt. Col. James Dunlop, who with his son-in-law, James Harris, founded the town. The parlor of this stone structure housed the first courthouse from 1800 to 1806. The western (left-hand) half of the house was built considerably later, in 1848, by the Valentine ironmasters” (my italics).
I hypothesized that Mary Ann Gilmore had placed her daughters with Isaac and Sarah Lawson in the summer of 1850 because Isaac was either her biological father, stepfather, adopted father, or foster father, making him a grandfather to Mary Rebecca and Rosetta Gilmore. That supposition was largely based on a 1909 newspaper article (discussed in detail below) reporting that two daughters of Mary Rebecca Gilmore (who by then was married to Charles Garner Sr.) were “nieces” of Isaac’s daughter Adeline. I suspected that that those girls were more accurately Adeline’s great-nieces, by virtue of their mother Mary Rebecca and Adeline being sisters, half sisters, or stepsisters.
Only much later in my research did I come across records confirming that Isaac Lawson was Mary Ann Gilmore’s father, and that Mary Ann was Adeline’s much older half sister. An 1884 deed involving Mary Ann and Lot 78 along E. Bishop Street indicated that she had inherited the real estate from Isaac Lawson by virtue of a will he had composed in the spring of 1870. I hastened to track down that will in the Centre County government archives, and when I finally perused it, I found it presenting a wealth of heretofore undiscovered biographical information. In addition to confirming Mary Ann Gilmore’s status as Isaac Lawson’s eldest surviving daughter, it identified a second-eldest surviving daughter: Sarah Williams (her married name), whom I had come to believe was the 14-year-old girl inaccurately identified as Sarah “Boston” in Isaac and Sarah Lawson’s household in 1850. Other important relationships reflected in Isaac’s “final will and testament” will be revealed as this post unfolds.
For instance, information presented in that will and in 1860 census records leads me to believe that Isaac’s wife Sarah—mother of Mary Ann Gilmore and Sarah Williams—died during the early 1850s. I have found no evidence of her existence after the 1850 census enumeration. In the mid-1850s Isaac apparently joined forces with a much younger second wife, whose first name was recorded on 1860 census schedules as “Milchi,” but who was more reliably identified in Isaac’s will and real estate records as “Milky.” That name is reported on Names.org to be of African origin, and to connote “lucky,” “success,” “fortune,” or “opportunity.” Milky Lawson told a census enumerator in 1860 that she had been born 24 years earlier in Maryland (circa 1836) and was unable to read. Those details strongly suggest she had been born into slavery, perhaps in the same area that her future husband, Isaac Lawson, had escaped or been freed from a decade or more earlier.
If Adeline’s death certificate is to be believed, among the first fruits of Milky’s union with Isaac was Adeline, conceived in the spring of 1855, and born in Bellefonte in January 1856. She would thus have been four years old when the borough’s residents were enumerated in the summer of 1860. Curiously, she was recorded as only three.
The 1860 census also identified a second daughter delivered by Milky Lawson, either in late 1858 or early 1859. Named “Julia,” this baby sister of Adeline was a year old when a census enumerator visited the Lawson home along E. Bishop Street in August 1860. A fifth member of the Lawson household was recorded during that visit as 56-year-old Mary Wesley, a mulatto, Maryland-born widow. I considered the possibility that Mary was Milky’s mother, and had come to live with the newly-married Lawsons after her husband had died. Perhaps Isaac had been instrumental in bringing Milky and/or her mother from Maryland to Bellefonte. Another possible scenario is put forward in the obituary cited at the beginning of this post, in which Adeline was said to have been “born in slavery in the South” (rather than in Bellefonte, as stated in her death certificate). Perhaps Milky gave birth to Adeline while still enslaved in Maryland, and only later did mother and daughter make their way to Bellefonte, either shortly before or after Julia was born.
I doubt we will ever find records reflecting exactly how the family of Isaac and Milky Lawson formed. We can only say for sure that it was not finished growing in the summer of 1860. Later in 1860 or early in 1861 (as reflected in Isaac’s will and subsequent census records), Milky bore a third child, giving Isaac his only son (and Adeline her only brother). Identified in census schedules and other records most frequently as “Edward” and less frequently as “Edmund,” this final product of Isaac and Milky’s partnership might have been known to family and friends as “Ed” or “Eddie.”
Edward’s birth demonstrated that, even at the relatively advanced age of 60 in August 1860, Isaac wasn’t finished producing children. We see another expression of vitality in his reporting to the census enumerator in August 1860 that he owned $1,000 worth of real estate and had amassed $100 in savings. By those measures, he ranked as one of the wealthiest black heads-of-household in Bellefonte—despite being unable to read. He had expanded his real estate holdings by 1860 to include the eastern half of Lot 78, as reflected on a map of Bellefonte published in 1858. That gave him possession of a second small house fronting on E. Bishop Street immediately east of the house he appears to have built shortly after acquiring the western half of Lot 78 in 1829. The order of the census enumeration in the summer of 1860 suggests that Isaac and his family—including three-year-old Adeline—continued to occupy the western house, while Isaac rented the smaller eastern house to the families of mulatto day laborers Samuel Smith and Baslin Bennet.
Enumerated near the Lawsons in 1860 was Isaac’s eldest daughter Mary Ann Gilmore, identified as an unmarried day laborer in her late 30s, living with her daughters Mary Rebecca (age 11) and Rosetta (10). Mary Ann now claimed to have been born around 1825 in Pennsylvania (rather than Virginia, as she had declared in 1850). I wondered initially if she was among the many people of color living in Pennsylvania in 1860 who had truthfully reported in 1850 being born south of the Mason-Dixon Line, but who felt safer in 1860—after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—claiming to have been born in Pennsylvania.[1] Later, after learning that Mary Ann was the eldest daughter of Maryland natives Isaac and Sarah Lawson, I concluded it was more likely that Mary Ann had either been born in Maryland and brought to central Pennsylvania as a girl, or that she had been born in or near Bellefonte, where her father Isaac made his first real estate purchase in 1829.
The 1860s proved to be a fateful decade for the family of Isaac and Milky Lawson. Scanty records appear to indicate that Julia Lawson (Adeline’s baby sister) died midway through that decade. Perhaps in connection with Julia’s death, Milky became mentally unstable to the point that Isaac felt compelled to send not only her, but Adeline and Edward as well, to live elsewhere. I have gingerly pieced together this series of unfortunate events from widely scattered records. I inferred Julia’s death from her absence from 1870 census records, as well as her omission from Isaac’s will, prepared in the spring of 1870. I discovered Milky’s fate only recently when my extended search for anyone with a similar name in Pennsylvania finally turned up a census record for a 44-year-old black woman from Spring Township, Centre County confined in the State Hospital for the Insane at Danville in June 1880, under the name “Milte Lawson.” Her entry in a patient ledger indicated that she had suffered her first “attack of mania” around 1867, and had been “insane” ever since.
During my initial round of research, I had no idea what had happened to Milky, or why I was unable to find her in census records after 1860. For that matter, I found no entry in 1870 census records for either Isaac Lawson or for Adeline. Only Isaac and Milky’s son Edward was accounted for, enumerated in the summer of 1870 as a nine-year-old member of a Williams household occupying the house on the eastern half of Lot 78, beside his former home on the western half of the lot. It was not until I tracked down Adeline in 1870 census records, then consulted a copy of Isaac’s will, that a fuller picture of the Lawsons’ travails of the 1860s began to emerge.
That picture would have been fuller much sooner if the obituary for Isaac that I consulted early in my research had mentioned his wives and children. Published in the May 13, 1870 edition of the Democratic Watchman, the obituary read: “Isaac Lawson, a venerable and worthy colored man, much respected by his own people, and generally esteemed by the whites, died at his home, on Bishop street, on Sunday last [May 8, 1870], and was buried on Tuesday. Mr. Lawson was a patriarch among our colored friends, and they will greatly miss him. He was sober, steady, industrious, inoffensive and, we believe, a worthy member of the church.”
[8-12-2023 update: Isaac’s death was also recorded on the 1870 Mortality Schedule for the South Ward of Bellefonte. Isaac’s entry asserts that he died in May 1870 at the age 93 (!), was still married, had been born in Maryland, had succumbed to “old age,” and had lately worked as a “Minister,” presumably for Bellefonte’s AME congregation.]
The report of Isaac’s death in the spring of 1870 accounted for why I had been unable to find an entry for him in census records compiled the following summer. But what of Adeline, who would have been 13 or 14 at the time of her father’s death? I searched for her initially in Centre County census records, then expanded my search to other central Pennsylvania counties, with little to show for my efforts. So I broadened my search of Ancestry.com’s database to include all of Pennsylvania, and formulated new queries with plausible variants of the names “Adeline” and “Lawson.” At long last I found Adeline enumerated on a Quaker farm in West Whiteland Township, Chester County, along the Lancaster Pike (present Route 30) roughly two miles east of Downingtown. She was identified as 13-year-old “Adeline Lausen,” a domestic servant in the household of 56-year-old farmer Thomas S. Downing and his 43-year-old wife Eliza. The latter names rang some bells for me, bringing to mind research I had conducted in both Chester and Centre Counties. I soon recognized Thomas Downing’s wife as Eliza Sharpless Valentine, daughter of Quaker ironmaster George Valentine and his wife Mary (née Downing), whom I had observed employing Adeline’s half-sister Mary Ann Gilmore in 1850 as a domestic servant in their home along Bellefonte’s W. High Street. The Lawson-Gilmore-Valentine-Downing web of connections suggested that either Thomas and Eliza Downing had been introduced to (and impressed by) pre-adolescent Adeline Lawson in Bellefonte prior to 1870, or that Eliza Downing’s parents had recommended and sent Adeline to the Downings sight unseen in the late 1860s. Only after learning of Milky Lawson’s fate did I entertain the likelier possibility that Isaac Lawson—nearing the end of his life without a wife to care for him—had been instrumental in seeing his daughter placed with a genteel Quaker family far removed from Lawson family turmoil in Bellefonte.
However she came to move from Bellefonte to Chester County, by July 6, 1870, 13-year-old Adeline was working for Thomas and Eliza Downing on their prosperous 196-acre estate dubbed “Arrondale Farm” (sometimes spelled “Arrandale”). Three Downing children were still living at home: Mary (age 20), Debbie (16), and Sallie (9). In addition to Adeline, the household’s resident staff comprised Guynney Ann Few, a 67-year-old white domestic servant; Ada Tabb, a 16-year-old black domestic servant, born in North Carolina; Jane Lee, a 13-year-old black domestic servant, born in Pennsylvania; and James Warren, a 17-year-old black farm hand, born in North Carolina. Adeline and her black housemates could not have been full-time workers, as they were each recorded as attending school within the past year. Like most Quakers of that era, the Downings must have placed a premium on education, even for their servants. The public schoolhouse closest to Arrondale Farm, known as “the Fairview School,” stood no more than a mile across the fields to the northeast.
The Downings “went to meeting” at the Downingtown Friends Meetinghouse, which is still standing along Lancaster Pike at the eastern end of Downingtown. I have been unable to learn whether Adeline and her fellow servants ever accompanied them. If they had wanted to, the Downings could have permitted Adeline, Ada, Jane, and James to attend the nearest AME church, known variously over the years as “Ebenezer,” “Deep Valley,” “Bacton,” and “Valley Hill,” housed in a modest stone meetinghouse on Bacton Hill just over four miles northwest of Arrondale. An AME congregation had been meeting in that location since 1832, according to a historical sketch posted on Findagrave.com, but it “dwindled towards the end of the 19th century as many of its members . . . moved closer to Malvern.”
I suspect that Adeline was limited to simple house chores early in her tenure with the Downings. Domestic tasks requiring more skill and experience, such as meal preparation, would have been assigned to Guynney Ann Few and/or the oldest black domestic servant, Ada Tabb. Within a few years, however, Adeline must have learned a great deal about cooking for an upper-class white family. By 1880 she would be skilled enough to serve as the only domestic servant in a busy household (as we shall soon see), and her “great reputation in the culinary art” would be publicly acclaimed in the early twentieth century.
Sometime during the 1870s—perhaps after she turned 18 in 1874—Adeline left Arrondale for employment as the only domestic servant on a farm about two miles to the east, on the outskirts of Exton. The 74-acre farm along the West Chester-to-Pottstown highway was owned and occupied as of June 1880 by 30-year-old bachelor farmer and cattle dealer David J. Clark. He shared the farmhouse with his elder brother and business partner John Z. Clark (37), John’s wife Hattie (34, née Rennard), and daughters Susanah (10), Emma (4), and Belle (2). The only non-Clark member of the household other than 22-year-old Adeline was Gideon D. Thomas, a 68-year-old white boarder. The Clark brothers were second-generation Irish-Americans and Methodist Episcopal church-goers, so Adeline might have found them different in many ways from the older, deeper-rooted, Quaker Downings.
I don’t know how long Adeline continued as a working member of the Clark household. One of her obituaries offered a general timeline of her life suggesting that she returned to Bellefonte in the early 1880s, initially to serve as a servant in the home of Dr. William Irvine Wilson, and later in the home of Dr. Wilson’s daughter Katharine, wife of Pennsylvania’s first Republican governor, Andrew Gregg Curtin. Part 2 of this post will look into that second major chapter in Adeline’s life.
Before we leave Chester County, though, I should note another important facet of Adeline’s life there (or so I conjecture). While she was still working for the Downings, or shortly after she moved to the nearby Clark farm, a black teenager named Edward Lawson came to work as a servant at Arrondale. He was enumerated there in June 1880 as 19-year-old Edward B. Lawson, a Pennsylvania native whose parents had been born in Maryland. It’s hard to imagine this newcomer being anyone other than Adeline’s brother, whom we last saw in 1870 as a nine-year-old living with his aunt and uncle Sarah and Henry Williams in their house on the eastern half of Bellefonte’s Lot 78. If the Edward Lawson enumerated with the Downings in 1880 was indeed Adeline’s brother, the siblings likely enjoyed a reunion in West Whiteland Township.
The only Edward Lawson that I have found recorded on census schedules after 1880 is a black man committed in 1889 to the Chester County Hospital for the Insane at Embreeville. That Edward appears to have lived the remaining four decades of his life in that institution. He was enumerated there in 1900, 1910, and 1920 as a patient or inmate born in Pennsylvania around 1860. He appears to be a good match for Adeline’s brother, and it would not be surprising if a child of Milky Lawson suffered a similar mental illness. Some doubt is cast on this supposed fate of Adeline’s brother, however, by certain details noted on the death certificate of the Edward Lawson who died in the Chester County Hospital for the Insane on August 2, 1932. A hospital official reported that the deceased was 74 years old (meaning he had been born around 1858-59), and that his parents were Pennsylvania natives John Lawson and Mahala Gibson. Those details don’t jibe with what I had learned about Adeline’s brother. Then again, a search of 1860, 1870, and 1880 census records yields no hits for either John or Mahala (Gibson) Lawson in Pennsylvania. I am left to wonder if the birth information cited on Edward Lawson’s death certificate had been garbled through translation.
[1]Gerald G. Eggert, “‘Two Steps Forward, a Step and a Half Back’: Harrisburg’s African American Community on the Nineteenth Century,” in African Americans in Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997, pp. 231-232).