As previously explained, Ira Prutzman, my maternal-side great-great-grandfather, was born in 1850 and lived in the Pocono Mountains region of Pennsylvania since at least the 1880s. For the most part, the family lineage pretty much stayed in that area for the next half-century.
But meanwhile, down around Jacksonville, Florida, things were not quite so bucolic. Sylvanus Henry Hart was born in 1860. At least one source states he was born in Darlington, South Carolina, but all notable events of his adult life occurred in and around Jacksonville.
There are no discernible records of who Sylvanus' parents were, which is not surprising given the year and the fact that Sylvanus was a gentleman of color, or as the newspaper articles and documents of his time put it, "a Negro" or "a colored." Born in northeast Florida five years before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865, he was almost assuredly born into slavery and most definitely the son of a slave. Although his mother would have been a slave, his father may have been either a slave or a slave owner. Read My Body Is a Confederate Monument if you can't understand how the latter can be.
Fortunately for Sylvanus, he only had to endure the horrors of slavery for five years before Emancipation. Of course, that's still a traumatic start to life and it wasn't exactly a cake-walk after that - he then had to come of age and grow up in the world of Reconstruction and Jim Crow laws. But he seems to have made the best he could of the situation.
The Crisis is the official magazine of the NAACP, founded in 1910 by editor W. E. B. DuBois and others. The Crisis has been in continuous print since 1910 and it is the oldest black-oriented magazine in the world. An article in the January 1942 issue titled Negro Labor in Jacksonville by Samuel Harper states, “Back in 1886 Negro bricklayers labored hard and worked ten hours a day at the rate of twenty-five cents per hour. They were very skillful at this trade." That's where I got my base-line figure for calculating the wages plantation slave-owner Isaiah D. Hart should have payed for the labor that earned him his fortune.
Harper's article in The Crisis article goes on to note, "Sylvanus Hart rose from the scaffold to a foreman in 1902" before retiring from the brick-laying trade. Good for him, I say. In his lifetime, he went from slave to contract labor (albeit at low wages) to management and finally to retirement, a prospect few if any previous black men in the Americas could imagine.
But wait, as they say, there's more. In the book Florida’s Black Public Officials, 1867-1924 by Canter Brown, Jr. (1998, University of Alabama Press), it’s noted that Jacksonville and the nearby town of LaVilla “constituted fertile grounds for minority office holding. With its black-majority population, LaVilla hosted a minimum of forty-six African Americans in its local government from no later than 1870 to its consolidation with Jacksonville in 1887." Sylvanus H. Hart, he notes, served as clerk during the 1880s.
So this is interesting. A man born as a slave becomes a free laborer, a bricklayer, and while still in his 20s, holds the political position of clerk for the town of LaVilla, Florida. Very impressive, young man.
But wait, there's still more. In an article titled "Industrious, Thrifty and Ambitious”: Jacksonville’s African American Businesspeople during the Jim Crow Era that ran in The Florida Historical Quarterly, (Vol. 90, No. 4, Spring 2012, pp. 453-487), David H. Jackson, Jr. writes:
Sylvanus H. Hart founded the Central Trust and Investment Company, becoming “Jacksonville’s first Negro banker.” He served as president and cashier of the bank which opened for business on October 6, 1902 with $800 in securities and $406 in cash. This endeavor proved successful and by 1904 it held $20,000 in paid-in-capital. By then it had 500 depositors, twenty of whom were white.
The American Bankers’ Association listed Central Trust as a member and according to the Jacksonville Evening Metropolis, it became "the only institution south of Richmond, Va., that has a membership in that association, and they have exchange relations with several large banks in the city of New York, and also belong to the Bankers’ Money Order Association, issuing money orders that are payable anywhere in or out of this country.” The paper continued, “All of Florida knows that Central Trust and Investment Company is owned, manned and managed wholly by colored men. From the start it has steadily gained the business confidence of the community, and among their long list of heavy depositors are many of the best and largest business men of both races in Jacksonville.” The bank closed in 1926, and all of its depositors received their money in full.
So, just that we're crystal clear on exactly what this man accomplished in his lifetime, he was born a slave in 1860 and became a brick-layer after Emancipation, served as a city clerk while in his 20s, became a foreman for the brick-layers by the age of 42 (1902) and the same year started his own bank, Jacksonville's first black-owned bank. The other references I've cited above all also note that the same Sylvanus Hart they discuss later became a banker, and I've found other corroborative documentation elsewhere on the internet.
That is the kind of rags-to-riches, Horatio Alger story we don't hear often enough in real life. I couldn't be prouder to say that Sylvanus Hart is my paternal great-grandfather..
In January of 1912, a Professor Joseph L. Wiley of Fessenden Academy made a speech in Tallahassee on the occasion of the celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation. The speech, "a most excellent one" according to the Ocala Observer, was printed in full in the New York Age on January 12. The speech covered four columns and held out "hope and inspiration to the negro race," and the author especially dwelled on the opportunities of African-Americans in the south. Among the examples of "thrift, enterprise and success," he noted that “Sylvanus Hart of Jacksonville, who is worth over $100,000, deserves special mention as a banker. He has made good . . . .” $100,000 in 1912, adjusted for inflation, is the equivalent of $2,643,237 in 2020.
Sylvanus H. Hart married Emma Louise Trowbridge of Georgia. Not much is known about Emma Louise, but from what little I can find, she appears to have been a formidable woman in her own right and a true peer to the ambitious Sylvanus. In the book Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America, Francesca Morgan writes:
Led by Emma Trowbridge Hart of Jacksonville, Florida, black women launched a nationwide effort in early 1899 to fund a $25,000 monument “to the memory of the colored heroes” of the Spanish-American War army, to be erected in some liberal city, “not Jacksonville.”
Sylvanus and Emma had one son, Sylvanus Henry Hart, Jr, on September 3, 1889. We'll talk about him in some future post.
Sylvanus Henry Hart, my great-grandfather, died at the age of 73 in 1933.
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