Good Morning POU! This week’s post will be a reposting of the life of Hannah Elias as taken from the book Black Fortunes, The First Black Millionaires. We may have quite a few posters that have not read this juicy tale about Hannah Elias and how she made her fortune. Enjoy!
On a wintry evening in 1884, couriers, mounted on horses and dressed in top hats and coats, cantered through the streets of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. They cut through winds that tore at their faces and rattled the branches of trees lining the streets as they went from house to house knocking on doors. When the residents answered, the messengers placed an envelope in their hands.
The Seventh Ward of Philadelphia, one of America’s first free black neighborhoods, had been founded by freed slaves in the eighteenth century and now contained more than six thousand black residents, many of them recent immigrants from former slave territories. The area, colloquially known as the “colored colony,” was a framework of residential streets that stretched from the city center to the mouth of the Schuylkill River. Until the late hours of the evening, its porches and sidewalks were filled with black men, women, and children, socializing or coming to or from work or errands.
The envelopes that were delivered protected a smaller envelope within them, which when opened revealed a card with crisp lettering. The card announced the wedding of Hattie, the eldest daughter of Charles Elias, the upcoming spring at the First Union Baptist Church. The men and women of the settlement were both surprised and excited to receive the invitations, as weddings were not a common event. More than half of the four thousand adults in the settlement were in common-law marriages, cohabited with lovers, or were lifelong bachelors and bachelorettes. Such arrangements were a remnant of plantation life, where enslaved people rarely married, as they needed the consent of their owners to do so legally.
The colony was buzzing in anticipation as the day of Hattie Elias’s wedding approached. “It was to be one of the most remembered events in the colored colony,” one invitee remembered. The Eliases were a family of eleven headed by Charles Elias, a caterer, and his wife, Mary. They lived in a three-story town house on a street inhabited by the settlement’s wealthiest black residents: doctors, dentists, preachers, lawyers, and undertakers. Neighbors considered them “fairly well-to-do” but not wealthy.
As a caterer, Elias was respected as an artisan in one of black America’s oldest trades. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, freed people who had worked as cooks on plantations took up catering. It became one of the first businesses in America whose proprietors included a substantial number of blacks. As a result, caterers, even years after slavery ended, enjoyed a special, almost honorific status within black communities. Elias labored to move his family to a wealthy block and place himself among the top caterers in the colony. Hattie’s wedding, with any luck, would mark the ascension of the Eliases as one of the leading Negro families in the colony.
As the wedding approached, Elias planned an impressive menu for the reception that would follow the nuptials: a spread of pickled vegetables and eggs, soup, fowl, and baked ham would be served, followed by a wedding cake—a confection of flour, butter, sugar, molasses, and fruit covered in white icing. It was to be a Baptist wedding, so there would be no drinking or dancing, making the food second in importance only to the bride herself. There was no concern in that regard. Like all the Elias daughters, Hattie had both appealing looks and evident refinement.
The Elias children were slender with a sandy-colored complexion like their mother’s. They had also inherited what many considered their father’s best trait: almond-shaped brown eyes, that he liked to attribute to having “Indian blood in ’em.” The children all attended colored public schools, and in addition to learning reading and arithmetic, they studied painting and music.
If there was an exception to the fine breeding of the Elias children, it was the youngest daughter of the family, eighteen-year-old Hannah Bessie, who was described by neighbors as “precocious.” She had never been in any real trouble but had a reputation for seeking attention, which could have been attributed to her youth.
The streets were brimming with pink, purple, green, and red in the spring of 1885, as the shadbush, sugar plum, and hawthorn trees growing along the sidewalks of Philadelphia’s streets began to bloom. On a warm evening, nearly a thousand guests filed into the chapel of First Union Baptist Church for Hattie Elias’s wedding.
It was one of the largest churches in the settlement, two stories with a stone exterior, pitched roof, and stained-glass windows trimmed with red stucco. Candles lit up the sanctuary as attendees filled the pews and balcony. Hattie wore a white dress of lace and satin, which her father had commissioned just for the occasion. The ceremony, an opening prayer and sermon followed by the exchange of vows, was short and occurred without incident.
As guests made their way from the chapel to the fellowship hall, where Charles Elias was readying a banquet, their attention began to drift elsewhere. All eyes rested on his youngest daughter, Hannah. She was wearing a ball gown that looked costly and elaborate. One guest described it as “a wonderful creation,” while others gathered around her to get a better view. When the affair let out late that night, it was widely agreed that Hannah Elias had been “the belle of the evening.”
Not much more was made of Hannah’s dress until several days later, when a group of police officers arrived unexpectedly at the Elias house looking for Hannah. They held in their hands a warrant for her arrest for larceny from her employer. Hannah worked in the home of a wealthy white woman in North Philadelphia who had heard about the dress that Hannah had worn to Hattie’s wedding and concluded that Hannah had borrowed a dress from her without consent.
The officers arrested her on the spot and took her to the Button Street police station, where they placed her in a holding cell to await trial. That evening she went before the judge and was convicted of larceny and sentenced to four months in Moyamensing Prison in South Philadelphia.
After four months in Moyamensing, Hannah Elias was set free. Upon receiving her walking papers, she set out for her family’s house in the Negro settlement. When she arrived, her father answered the door but blocked her entry. Charles, whom Hannah had not seen since she was arrested, was still worked up over the embarrassment of her arrest. He sent her away, banishing her from the family home indefinitely. For the next three months, she was not seen or heard from.
IT WAS ALMOST SUNRISE AS JOHN R. PLATT AND HIS FRIENDS staggered through the streets of the Tenderloin district in Manhattan, bumping into men stumbling home drunk or dragging girls into alleys and hotels. On street corners and from the entrances to homes, prostitutes in tightly laced bustiers and bonnets topped with feathers propositioned them as they passed by.
The Tenderloin, a poor neighborhood of blacks and European immigrants, was the city’s largest red-light district, stretching from 23rd to 42nd Streets in the heart of midtown Manhattan. It was controlled by organized crime families who bribed city officials to turn a blind eye to the brothels, peep shows, saloons, and gambling joints that operated out of the row houses that lined its streets.
That night, Platt and his group had been in the Tenderloin drinking and fornicating for hours and showed no signs of tiring. Given that the men were all in their sixties, it was an impressive show of stamina. They were, however, growing bored. Platt recalled that “having seen everything lively among the whites, someone said they wanted to see some coon joints.”
Fulfilling that request fell to Platt, the group’s guide for the evening. He was the owner of a glass-manufacturing company in New York and resided there with his wife and their children. His guests were retired firefighters from San Francisco visiting on holiday. Platt thought back to when he had visited them in San Francisco in 1864, remembering, “They showed me the time of my life in ’Frisco.”
It was late, but he felt obliged to press on and he knew just where they could find a black establishment. Platt took his men to a “resort” that operated out of a house owned by an acquaintance, Julius “Pop” Miller, on the south side of the Tenderloin. A mulatto woman whose name he couldn’t recall ran the operation. The men entered the house and stepped into a room decorated with carpet, a few pieces of furniture, and oil paintings on the wall and filled with teenage black girls. Platt’s friends grabbed girls and retired to corners and back rooms.
Platt ended up with Hannah Elias, who introduced herself as Bessie. Platt was sixty-four years old, forty-five years Elias’s senior. The contrast between them appeared even greater when they were near each other. Platt had lines under his eyes and pale skin, and both his beard and hair were turning white.
Elias was nineteen but appeared to be just past puberty. Platt guessed that “she was a little girl of 15 or 16,” when he first saw her. She was thin and had a round face with a flat nose and big brown eyes with heavy eyelids. Her hair was dark and curly, and she kept it pinned back, with bangs draping down her forehead in front. She was confident and smart, which, along with her girlish appearance, charmed many male visitors. One of the girls who worked with Elias summed her up this way: “She exhibited a peculiar influence over white men.”
Taken with his companion, Platt spent the rest of the evening at the house in her company. He would return several more times after their first encounter to see her until one night he went to call on her and was told she had left the house.