Go: The Maggie Walker Historic Site - ‘It’s not just some house without a story’

By JAMES F. LEE

VIRGINIAN-PILOT CORRESPONDENT  | MAY 03, 2020

“Go” is an occasional feature series spotlighting places to go and things to do within an eight-hour drive of Hampton Roads. Although travel options are limited because of coronavirus restrictions, there is no restriction on planning for a later time.

How can you define a community leader? Perhaps by the hats she wears. In the case of Richmond’s Maggie Walker, she wore many indeed: banker, newspaper publisher and editor, candidate for public office, school teacher, speech writer, orator, civil rights leader and entrepreneur.

But it is the banker’s hat that sticks (she was the first black woman to found a chartered bank).

“She was put in a box as a woman bank president,” said Ajena Rogers, site supervisor at the Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site. “[But] it’s the richness of her story that’s starting to come to the fore.”

My wife Carol and I traveled to Richmond in late winter to visit the Walker home, an elegant brick Victorian row house with a columned front porch, on East Leigh Street.

Rogers explained that Walker was born in 1864 to a formerly enslaved mother in Richmond. She was educated in Richmond’s segregated public schools, and later taught school for several years. While a student at Richmond Colored Normal School, she joined the Independent Order of St. Luke, a fraternal organization that administered to the sick and aged and promoted self-help, African American solidarity and financial empowerment. Over the years, she rose to the top leadership position in the order, and her guidance saved it from insolvency.

In 1903, she founded the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, overcoming the reluctance of a skeptical community that didn’t trust banks. By persuasion, by preaching solidarity and by example, she made the bank a success. She told anyone who would listen that no matter how much or how little they deposited, the community was all in it together. She also founded and was editor-in-chief of the St. Luke Herald, a newspaper that advocated for civil rights.

In 1905, Walker bought a nine-room house on East Leigh Street in the Jackson Ward neighborhood, eventually increasing its size to 28 rooms to accommodate her growing family. Her home became a meeting place for many of the leading African American figures of the time.

“She used her home as a place to show what she accomplished and also to show what can be accomplished,” Rogers said.

Rogers led us through the front door into the impressive formal parlor and music room. Most of the furniture here is original, including a baby grand piano, a leather settee and beautiful Asian vases on the main fireplace mantel. Elaborate moldings crown the bay window. One reproduced item here is a wheelchair with a writing table. Walker’s diabetes left her paralyzed from the waist down for the last six years of her life, yet she remained engaged in her work right up until her death.

The library contains Walker’s desk and her glass-fronted bookcases. I saw Shakespeare, Twain and Roman classics among the many volumes. Above the bookcase are diplomas and degrees awarded to Walker and her family members. On the walls are prints and photos of African American leaders, including George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington and Nannie Helen Burroughs, many of whom Walker knew personally. There is also a print of Phillis Wheatley, the mother of African American literature, and a small bust of George Washington.

The dining room is elegantly furnished with a pressed-tin panel ceiling, large mirrors, fine-cut glass, Austrian china, and mahogany furniture. Among those dining at this table were Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois and Mary McLeod Bethune.

“This is where people would see the public side of Maggie Walker, the public face she would present,” Rogers said.

The Walker household was often a very full one. At various times her two sons and their wives and children lived in the house, as did Walker’s adopted daughter, Polly Anderson. Walker’s mother lived here until her death in 1922.

After leaving the dining room, we walked through to the den, a more personal, intimate space featuring an electric Victrola with a radio, and a couch.

In the kitchen, where the family ate its meals, a large cast iron stove predates Walker’s ownership of the house. A wooden icebox sits against one wall.

Near the kitchen is a laundry room with three tubs, running water, a gas stove, an electric iron and a large electric sheet press, all modern conveniences for the time. Walker never forgot her childhood, engaging in the back-breaking work of a laundress, and wanted to spare her housekeeper as much of the drudgery as possible with modern conveniences. A box of Ivory Snow sits on a shelf.

In an unfurnished downstairs bedroom, Rogers showed us the two-story hand-pulled elevator that Walker had installed after her paralysis, allowing her access to the second floor and to her own bedroom. The elevator was designed by Charles Russell, one of the first licensed black architects in Virginia.

Upstairs we saw the grandchildren’s bedroom with their actual dolls placed on the bed — one a “topsy-turvy” doll of a black woman on one side and a white woman on the other. Walker inhabited a large suite of rooms that included a full bathroom, sitting room, dinette/kitchenette and bedroom. A photo of Franklin Roosevelt hangs on the wall. Recognizing Walker’s importance as a leader, Roosevelt invited her to his first inauguration, which she attended with her grandchildren.

“Her room here was a place where she could find sanctuary, composure, solitude,” Rogers said.

She died in this room from complications of diabetes in 1934.

After our visit to the Maggie Walker National Historic Site, Rogers suggested we take the short walk to the Maggie Walker Monument, an impressive 10-foot bronze statue at Broad and Adams streets erected in 2017. In a semi-circle around the statue, several benches highlight her achievements.

Sitting near the monument was Tiffany Allen of Richmond. I asked if she had ever heard of Maggie Walker.

“All I know is she was the first black woman to open a bank,” she said. Thinking about it, though, she added, “She is important because women didn’t have power back then.”

The banker hat still remains. But the richness of the story is becoming known.

Patrick King, a a fourth-grade teacher in Surry County, visits the Walker site with his classes as part of their unit on Virginia history.

“She represents the life of an African American after the Civil War and Reconstruction,” King said. “Fourth graders are interested to see a real-life example, to be in the house she lived in, and not just reading about it in a book.

“It’s not just some house without a story.”

IF YOU GO…

The Maggie Walker National Historic Site is closed because of the public health risk associated with COVID-19. The site will reopen when conditions permit.

Normal hours: Open Tuesday through Saturday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

3215 E. Broad St., Richmond; 804-771-2017

Admission: free

More info: www.nps.gov/mawa/index.htm

James F. Lee, jameslee@bucknell.edu

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