LeBaron: Pioneer Black barbers made their mark on Sonoma County’s early towns

Another census year is over and, in due time (whatever that means), we will be told how many of us are here, how old we are, where we live, what we do and, most important for the subject of this column — and the focus of this particular month — what color we are.

We are in the middle of Black History Month, a time to consider and to honor some 40 million Black Americans along with two of the nation’s greatest leaders — one who owned slaves, the other who freed them.

It’s a time when we are urged to consider how the wide variations in the colors of our skins has governed our family histories. As always, we attempt to bring the questions home, to our doorsteps.

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The 1850 federal census of the new state of California was an out-and-out disaster. “Slapdash” is the term that has been used to describe the hurry-up count of this newly explored region, far-off from the place where laws were made, populated by people that have been referred to as “rolling stones,” come to mine gold, maybe going home, maybe not.

The first “official” count was so bad, in fact, that the feds ordered another, in 1852, to iron out the kinks and, for all purposes, discarded the ’50 version.

Nonetheless, those sketchy first numbers are, in Black History Month, interesting to explore.

That highly questionable 1850 census, for all its flaws, does provide the only quasi-official first look at the demographics of the new county; all of it apparently tabulated by a census taker named Mizner between Oct. 20 and Nov. 2 of 1850. (Statehood had become official Sept. 9 of that year.)

Mizner’s count totaled 561 people — 50 names for 121 households, 355 males, 204 females, 559 white and 2 Black people.

It tells us the two Black residents were Joseph Silver, a 28-year-old “freeman” born in Pennsylvania and his wife, Louisa, 18. It listed Silver’s occupation as “steward.”

The Silvers lived in the household of Dr. Elisha Ely, a 26-year-old bachelor physician in the then-county seat of “Sonoma City.” Dr. Ely has the distinction of being the first Sonoma County coroner.

The Silvers, however, were not the Sonoma Valley’s only Black residents.

Sonoma historian Peter Meyerhof tells of a visitor to Joseph Hooker’s Agua Caliente ranch in 1852 who wrote that Hooker (who, of course, would later go east to lead Union troops in the Civil War as “Fighting Joe.”) took him into his house “where I found a colored woman, who acted as cook, etc., for the Colonel.”

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BY 1860, with California’s gold flowing east to the national coffers, the census takers were a lot more careful and, one presumes, more accurate. And there were newspapers in our towns — in Sonoma in the earliest years, then Petaluma, Santa Rosa, Healdsburg — and their archives offer information, sometimes in glimpses only, of what their world was like.

We learn a lot from those pioneer journalists about the early citizenry, all the people it takes to make a working community. The farmers, the hostelers, the money lenders, the merchants, the stage drivers, the stable owners, a doctor, maybe two per town, the circuit riding ministers, and — oh, yes, the barbers.

Author Quincy Mills, in his 2013 book, Cutting Along the Color Line, writes of the Black “entrepreneurs” before and after the Civil War who shaped and shaved “White Customers Only,” as the signs read, achieved unprecedented financial independence and established an unprecedented Black commercial sphere.

Indeed, the Black men who had the first barbershops in Sonoma County’s early towns found themselves important in the communities, accepted for their craft if not as equal citizens. Their service was absolutely necessary. Their shops were where men gathered — sometimes in or near the hotels where the stages came and went — where all the news of the outside world arrived from the populated East. Barbers were familiar and important figures. And, more often than not, they were Black.

George Miller

George Miller was. A Black man, born in New Jersey, Miller came to Petaluma with his young family in 1855, and opened a barbershop, the Humboldt Shaving and Hair Dressing Salon on Main Street, for white clientele.

It was, as Petaluma historian John Sheehy indicates in a post last April on his “Petaluma Historian” blog, a financial success.

But Miller, like many Black people in early California, was “interested in more than just providing a close shave and a good haircut.”

He represented Sonoma County in the state’s first Convention of Colored Citizens, working to end the state’s “restrictions” on Black people’s right to vote. And, with public schooling denied “Negroes and Mongolians,” Miller was front and center in the establishment of Petaluma’s Black School, in a house on Washington Street, with a Black teacher from San Francisco.

It was among the earliest publicly funded “colored schools” in the state.

“Half of the eight students attending,” Sheehy writes, “were the children of George Miller.”

John Richards

John Richards, a Kentucky-born slave, bought his freedom and lived in several Midwestern states before arriving in Santa Rosa with his wife, Philena, in 1857, to open his barbershop near Santa Rosa House, the town’s busiest hotel and the stage stop. Men gathered at Richards’ barbershop, whether they needed a haircut or not.

Richards prospered; he housed freed slaves who came from the South during and after the Civil War, and brought Samuel Clark, another Black barber, to work in the busy shop. Ultimately, Richards owned barbershops in both Ukiah and Lake County. He and Philena bought several tracts of land on Santa Rosa’s southern side, including property that is now part of both South Park and the Sonoma County Fairgrounds.

William and Martha Scott

William and Martha Scott brought their family to Healdsburg in 1866, coming from Ohio, where they had lived as “Free People of Color,” “a term originating in Louisiana and the French West Indies to describe people of African, European and sometimes Native American descent.

Holly Hoods, research curator at the Healdsburg Museum, wrote of the Scotts in the museum’s monthly publication in 2013. By now, you should not be surprised to learn that while Martha was a dressmaker who operated her business from their home on Matheson Street, William advertised his work as a “Tonsorial” artist “with special attention to the grooming of Ladies Hair.”

In the 1870s, Hoods tells us, William was listed in a San Francisco Black newspaper called the Elevator as an “orator” at a political conference. The Millers were, in writer Hoods’ words” “definitely uplifters.”

Charles Franklin Sloan

“Professor” Charles Franklin Sloan was another Black barber who undoubtedly trimmed the beards of hundreds of woodsmen and millworkers at his Duncans Mills barber shop in the 1870s.

Monte Rio’s John Schubert, chronicler of the region’s history, writes of Sloan in his book titled Guerneville Early Days, quoting the description from his 1899 obituary in the Santa Rosa Republican as a “legendary local character who could recite history ‘by the yard.’ ”

Sloan may have been the first Black person in the lower Russian River area, Schubert suggests. And if It was his skill with razor and brush that kept him at the forefront of River life for more than 20 years, it was his knowledge of history that earned him the “Professor” sobriquet.

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Four Black barbers (at least) on the Sonoma County, California frontier in the state’s first two decades is a count that seems to defy the odds. It could be a statistic offered up as further proof of author Mills’ contention that such men represented a unique “commercial sphere” in the nation’s history.

It seems likely there were more Black barbers than there is room here to celebrate in this Black History Month — although we cannot leave this chapter of local history without pointing to the life of the late Gilbert Gray.

Gray — who brought his family to Santa Rosa a century after the aforementioned; who was instrumental in the establishment of the NAACP chapter in Sonoma County; who helped to create the Community Baptist Church; who established a foundation to aid in the education of young Black people — was a barber. Originally from Texas, he and his wife, Alice, came to the Bay Area in the 1940s to work in the shipyards. At war’s end, with a growing family, he went to barber school and was a military barber at the Air Force’s Hamilton Field in Marin County for nearly 30 years.

Gray died in Santa Rosa in 1997, an acknowledged and honored local leader of Martin Luther King’s “dream” journey.

One hopes Gray knew what a unique part of Black history he shared.