From Howardsville to our camp I saw lots of mines, the ore is what the call […]. It consist of lead silver copper gold and (bed Brig) (NB they do not find the BB in the mind but on the boarding […]) The gold bug mine Willie Mitchell is going under if they [….] raise some more money and a lot of it, that is what those that know say. I will not give the names of any but one is related to [….] This company has spend over one million $ and not a cent to show for it as yet but there are lots of mines that are paying big. [….] is nothing [letter ends]
Rebecca Primus in Later Life
David O. White
I BELIEVE that one of the joys that can be experienced in performing historical research is to take a little-known but relevant story of the past and make it available for others to read and study. When the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission of Connecticut produced a series of booklets on a variety of topics on the Revolution it was my good fortune in 1973 to be able to write one entitled “Connecticut’s Black Soldiers in the American Revolution.”
In researching materials for the black soldiers study it was gratifying to be able to locate the names of so many African Americans who had served in the American Revolution. One of the men who intrigued me more than the others was Gad Asher of Guilford, Connecticut. This was mostly because his grandson, Jeremiah Asher, wrote an autobiography in 1850 that included a few details about the elder Asher and his life in Africa, in slavery, in the war, and in freedom.1
However, a continued interest in other areas of African American history led me to discover at the same time the Primus papers at the Connecticut Historical Society. A quick reading of some of the letters in this collection made me realize that they provided a greater opportunity than the soldiers had to study the lives of local African Americans in our history. As a result, I put Gad Asher on hold.
There were six members of the Primus family, and the Primus papers consisted of letters written by a son in Boston, a daughter in Maryland, and a family friend living in Hartford. This unique correspondence was a rich source of information about a family’s identity and the personalities of its members, but was virtually unknown to the public because few had ever worked with the collection before. I began to search for additional information on the Primus family and looked through a variety of historical sources in and around Hartford. One of these sources was an obituary on Holdridge Primus, father of the family, which indicated he had moved to Hartford from Guilford.2
My devotion to the Primus papers had made it impossible for me to find time to work on Gad Asher’s background, but now that I had two topics to research in Guilford a trip to the town’s archives was in order.3 I went there with a dual purpose. First, I wanted to find as much information as I could about the ancestors of Holdridge Primus, particularly the names of his parents. Second, I wanted to locate the names of any descendants of Gad Asher in an effort to learn more about his family. To my amazement, what appeared to be two separate quests was actually one. Holdridge Primus turned out to be a grandson of Gad Asher.
Linking Gad Asher and Holdridge Primus was one of a number of interesting and important discoveries connected with my research on the Primus family, and I was certain that if I traveled to Royal Oak, Maryland, where Rebecca wrote nearly all of her letters, I would find more. This seemed particularly promising since her correspondence was more descriptive than that her brother Nelson wrote from Boston, but also because a rural town like Royal Oak would seem less likely to have changed than a city the size of Boston. Once in Royal Oak I learned that the schoolhouse built under Rebecca’s direction in the late 1860s was still standing in the 1970s and was being used as a private residence. However, it had continued to be a school for the black population of Royal Oak until 1929, which was sixty years after Rebecca left the area. For most of that time it was operated under the jurisdiction of the state of Maryland and consisted of one room serving primary through the seventh grade.4 Evelyn Ross and Helen Murray, two lifelong residents of Royal Oak, attended this school when they were children. In fact, Mrs. Ross’s father, Joseph Thomas, and her grandfather, Henry Thomas, had been students there as well. Henry was the younger brother of Charles Thomas, and because he was born in 1855 may well have been a student there when Rebecca was its teacher. Although it was later known as the Royal Oak School, the children who attended its classes jokingly told others that they had “graduated from Primus Institute.”5
When Rebecca left Maryland in 1869 and returned to Hartford she again entered the world of historical obscurity, in the sense that the informative letters that revealed so much about her activities and of those around her no longer needed to be written; therefore, little can be found about her subsequent life. Any correspondence that she did write, which would have likely been mailed to people outside of Hartford, has not survived to anyone’s knowledge. Documents in the Primus papers and information from other sources reveal a little about Rebecca and her family, but not much. Holdridge continued to be employed at the Seyms grocery store, and his house on Wadsworth Street in Hartford was valued at five thousand dollars. Hettie was still a dressmaker. Nelson remained in Boston with his young family and would eventually move to California. There is no indication that the Hartford school Rebecca conducted before she went to Maryland was continued in the 1870s. The 1870 census simply listed her as “at home.” Whether she held jobs of any kind is not indicated in the Hartford city directories or census records. Rebecca’s interest in her church never faded and she was the assistant superintendent of its Sunday school in 1871. However, she gave up this position for the next ten years, and this may have been connected to the appearance in the city of her close friend and former landlord, Charles Thomas of Royal Oak.
In Hartford, Charles Thomas boarded with the Primus family in 1872 and worked first as a janitor and later as a gardener. Sometime between 1872 and 1874 Thomas and Rebecca were married, and by 1874 they had moved to a house on Wolcott Street, which was not far from her parents’ home on Wadsworth Street. The relocation of Charles Thomas from Maryland to Hartford and his immediate association with Rebecca indicates that they had made a greater impression on each other than her letters reveal. However, it also poses an interesting question, since my research in Maryland never turned up a date of death for Sarah Thomas, his wife in Royal Oak. On October 12, 1871, Sarah deeded her portion of their Royal Oak property to her husband, and two months later he entrusted this property to William Tilgham to pay off any debts and collect any rents “which the said Charles H. Thomas could do if personally present.” When he sold this property in 1875 Rebecca signed the deed as his wife.6 When I mentioned this situation to Evelyn Ross and Helen Murray they informed me that family lore had always been that Sarah Thomas “died of a broken heart” when her husband left her for the New England schoolteacher. My personal journey in the study of Rebecca and her values makes me believe that somewhere in the records of Maryland is a different explanation. I only wish I had found it.
Like Holdridge Primus, his father-in-law, Charles Thomas became well known among Hartford’s black community. In 1876 he obtained work in Philadelphia on the grounds of the Centennial Exposition that celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. An August 19, 1876, letter from a relative in Philadelphia informed Rebecca that her husband “is looking fine now he has got fix up nicely again he says he is doing a good business.”7 On a hunch that Rebecca might have traveled to Philadelphia and visited the Connecticut building on the exposition grounds I examined the register that had been kept there for visitors to that building to sign their names, and found that Rebecca and Mehitable had added their signatures on November 2, 1876.8 Ten years later Thomas was hired as a doorman by the Connecticut General Assembly at the State Capitol building during the legislative session of 1885-86. Because he was the means through which messages from the governor’s office reached the lieutenant governor he was later referred to as “Senator Thomas.”9 Employment as a doorman by the state Senate was probab
ly an honor for anyone at that time, but for an African American it would likely have enhanced Thomas’s status in Hartford more than it would have had he been white. A letter written to him in 1887 by an old friend in Royal Oak not only indicates that Thomas had maintained ties to his former world, but the writer also concluded that Thomas had shown courage in moving north to live with strangers and in doing so developed “a reputation that any one of our class should be proud.”10
Deaths impacted the Primus family beginning in 1884 when Holdridge died of a paralytic stroke. He was buried at a family plot in Zion’s Hill Cemetery in Hartford. Hettie inherited the house at 20 Wadsworth Street along with property in Branford that had been given to Holdridge’s father by Gad Asher. The wording in the obituary for Holdridge Primus indicates that whoever read it would have been acquainted with his existence. He had worked for Seyms and Company for over forty years, and earned additional money as a waiter at private parties in the city. Apparently, he was so well known among white families that his advice was sought in locating women to be servants in their homes. When Augustus Washington, a Hartford educator and early photographer, moved to Liberia in the 1850s to escape racism in the United States he wrote of the hardships he found in his new country, but that Holdridge Primus would be a success there. With nearly fifty years of service to the Talcott Street Congregational Church—service that began before the popular minister James Pennington arrived—the church passed resolutions on his behalf in losing what was likely one of its major supporters.11
The death of Charles Thomas in 1891 had a greater impact on Rebecca. He apparently had been hit on the head by a stone while watching a street fight and subsequently was unable to work regularly, which left him and Rebecca somewhat destitute.12 With his death she moved in with her mother at 20 Wadsworth Street. In 1899 Hettie Primus died and the Talcott Street Congregational Church held an elaborate service in honor of her more than sixty years of service to the congregation. She was buried next to her husband. The family’s homestead on Wadsworth Street was sold and Rebecca, her sister Bell, and Bell’s husband, William Edwards, moved to a house on Adelaide Street in the southern part of Hartford.
Not many African American families lived in south Hartford in the early 1900s but there were several individuals still active in the city in the 1970s who remembered Rebecca Primus during this period of her life. From them I was able to obtain a limited amount of material, which was basically recollections about an elderly woman by those who were then in their youth.13 Rebecca’s neighbor on Adelaide Street was Warner Lawson, who had sung with his wife in the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and in the early part of the twentieth century had taught music in Hartford. Their son became a professor of music at Howard University and their daughter became a professor at the University of Hartford. Nearby was the family of Louis Peterson, whose son wrote the 1953 play Take a Giant Step.
During her years on Adelaide Street Rebecca Thomas was known as Aunty Thomas, or Aunt Becky. One acquaintance had been told that Rebecca once taught in South Carolina and another was under the impression that she and Charles Thomas had been missionaries in Africa.14 None of this was true, but it appears that those who did remember her were not aware of her work with the freedmen’s schools at the end of the Civil War. Yet in old age she was still an inspiration. She continued to be part of the Talcott Street Church’s Sunday school, where her favorite role was that of teacher to a class of young men she referred to as her “boys,” but others dubbed “Aunt Becky’s boys.” It was said of her at that time that she was the “nearest thing to being a saint” that anyone knew. She attended church every Sunday and read the Bible every day. Aware of her interest in the worship service and that she was hard of hearing, the minister gave her typed copies of his sermons.
Warner Lawson was the organist for the Talcott Street Congregation and on many Sundays took Rebecca to church. In return, Rebecca provided baby-sitting services for the Lawsons, and sometimes washed their dishes because she believed that Mrs. Lawson dropped too many of them. She also did light cleaning at Mr. Lawson’s downtown studio, but this was more to please her than due to any real need for her services. In addition to being sufficiently hard of hearing that people had to shout, Rebecca had poor eyesight and used a magnifying glass to read. She is remembered as being short, thin, and quite dark in complexion. The only known picture of her is a 1922 photograph of the members of her church standing on the sidewalk of Talcott Street.15 More than one person interviewed about Rebecca recalled that she was well liked and several used the term “a wonderful person.”
One of the interesting sidelights of my conversations with two individuals who remembered Rebecca was their belief that she and Charles Thomas had had a child. While I was unable to find a record of such a birth, one said that she saw a picture in Rebecca’s room of a son who had died many years earlier.16
Rebecca Primus Thomas died on February 21, 1932, at the age of ninety-five. She had suffered a long illness and spent her last days at Hartford’s Municipal Hospital. She was survived by two daughters of Bell and a daughter of her adopted sister, Phrone. Her funeral was held at the Talcott Street Church where she worshiped all her life, taught for many years, and eventually became a deaconess.17 Rebecca was buried next to her parents, but without a headstone. She was the last of Hartford’s Primus family. The collection of family letters and documents she had kept for so many years found its way to the Hobby Shop in Hartford, and in 1934 this collection was acquired by the Connecticut Historical Society.
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