A look at a few outlying west and east side Black neighborhoods of the early 20th century, showing how African-Americnas were “suburbanizing” beyond the near west side at an early date.

 

Outlying West Side Black Communities

 

In the early 20th century black communitys began to form beyond the near West Side;  two were Tin Town and Pontiac Avenue.  A later one might have been Benn’s Plat.

 

Tin Town

 

In the account of the racial disturbance at Lakeside from my previous post , the black kids who had the rocks stockpiled near McCabe Park probably came from Tin Town, which was next to McCabe’s Park.

 

 

This was an early black community beyond the city limits. The black church here was Upshaw Mission. Based on the description in Peter’s book this sounds like a sort of self-help build-it-yourself place.

 

 

This apparently was not uncommon elsewhere in the US.  Thomas Sugrue in “The Origins of the Urban Crisis” describes the Eight-Mile/Wyoming neighborhood in Detroit as such a place.

 

And Andrew Weise in Places of Their Own also notes this as a form of black community in his chapter “The Outskirts of Town: The Geography of Black Suburbanization Prior to 1940”.  Dayton is almost a textbook case study of the peripheral black communities discussed by Wiese :

 

Andrew Wiese begins Places of Their Own and his case for the importance of black suburbanization by pushing back the timeline of black suburbia to the early twentieth century. These early black suburbs shared much with white working-class streetcar suburbs but little with exclusive planned subdivisions; blacks clustered and were restricted to peripheral industrial suburbs, domestic service towns, or informal rural clusters. In some of these suburbs blacks slowly built their own homes, tended vegetable gardens, and raised chickens; almost all black suburbanites idealized rural life, thrift, church, and family

 

Pontiac Avenue

 

A different, more conventional approach approach than self-building was the Pontiac Avenue neighborhood, which was probably black from day one, as the congregation bought a lot there in 1913, and it was still partly undeveloped in 1919.

 

 

 

What makes this different from Tin Town is that this was probably more conventional working class housing : rows of identical two story houses might indicate serial construction by merchant builders rather than self-built cottages.

 

Pontiac Avenue was part of a sort of checkerboard pattern of development in the Edgemont area, with open space and factorys separating the different subdivisions, which would have permitted limited segregation of streets and plats.

 

 

A close up with the church circled

 

 

 

Benn’s Plat

 

This is a familiar location to anyone going to the UD Arena or Welcome Stadium, or driving down Edwin Moses & I-75. 

 

A map of the area sometime between the turn of the last century and WWI. One can see the unchannelized Great Miami and the little riverside plat out away from Edgemont. Presumably it was all low lying bottomland between Cincinnati Street and the river.

 

 

(I also located the Pontiac Street community mentioned earlier, as another example of a suburban black settlement).

 

From the 1940 housing census, one can see both Pontiac Street and Benn’s Plat as developed black settlements (the xs mean 5 or fewer houses),

 

 

The large area of some of the census blocks mask how underdeveloped this area was

 

 

(One can see the diagonal of Cincinnati Street, the old power plant at Millers Ford, and the Stewart Street Bridge)

 

Here’s a close up: where you can just barley make out the houses. I think the channelization of the river might have eaten up a lot of the original plat:

 

 

In Dayton’s African American Heritage Margaret E. Peters writes in a caption of a group photo of the South Side Civic Association (SSCA):

 

”….Benn’s plat, a half-square mile site now occupied by Welcom Stadium, lacked many basic services. By 1944, after organizing and going to the City Commission twenty-seven times, they had mail delivery, telephones, and hard surfaced streets.”

 

“When the land was condemned because the Miami Conservancy District planned to use it, the residents went to court and got a fair price for their homes….”

 

Apparently sometime after this Miami University had considered this site as location for their Dayton branch campus (similar to their branch campus in Middletown or Hamilton), but instead co-located with the OSU branch campus as Wright State.

 

Other outlying black communities where the Ridgewood Heights/Crown Point areas out in Jefferson Township beyond the VA (the Ridgewood Heights community had developed by 1930 ) and perhaps Hog Bottom south of Germantown Street.

 

East Dayton Black Communities

 

Black settlement wasn’t confined to the West Side. Three outlying black communities grew up along the Mad River east of the city.

 

One formed in the vicinity of the Brownell Boiler Works, at Finley, Springfield, & First intersection another and one formed in the bottomlands between the Mad River and Valley Street. Yet another formed out Springfield Street near the stockyards.

 

 

Valley Street community:  “Happy Valley”(?)

 

Charles Mosley Austin’s church records have a listing for a congregation that formed at the Valley Street settlement for 1920. This area was platted in the 1900s, so presumably blacks moved out here in the first 20 years of the 20th century.  The Urban League files from the 1950s mention an outlying community here called “Happy Valley” (though its unclear if this is the same place).

 

The interesting thing about this fairly remote location is that it was shared by Dayton’s Polish community, who’s own little ethnic settlement was immediately adjacent, but more on Valley Street probably clustered around St Adalbert & Sig’s General Store.

 

In Midwestern cities it wasn’t unusual for eastern European immigrants to also settle in fringe locations, either as expansions from an in-town port-of-entry community or as sites of first settlement. This happened in Detroit, Chicago, South Bend, and other places. So a good parallel with what was happening with the blacks in the same era, here in Dayton.

 

Its unclear what happened to this congregation. The settlement itself, though very visible concentration on the 1940 housing survey, apparently was removed when Route 4 was built through the area, so there is nothing left to show.

 

 

Sachs-Pruden Plat/Finley-First-Springfield Streets Community.

 

This community might have formed a bit later, as mentions in Peters’ history of Dayton’s black community note Shiloh Baptist congregation forming in the1920s, with the first congregation on Springfield Street near Finley, then moving to a church @ Finley and Pruden on the Sachs- Pruden plat, directly across from the Brownell Boiler Works.

 

Yet, according to the 1940 housing survey, this was not an exclusively black community. Yet one could see the start of black area west of Finley & South of Third, westward towards Tals Corner.

 

The Sachs-Pruden plat area was platted in the 1880s, around the time the boiler works was built. But by 1919 it was still about half undeveloped. A streetcar loop was routed down through here sometime before 1920, so good transit access into the city came late

 

 

By the late 1920s,maybe early 30s, one can see the Sachs-Pruden plat partially developed, but a lot still empty (Erie RR Dayton shops visible at bottom, including a coaling facility; Dayton was a western terminus for the Erie).

 

 

The Brownell works still stands today, though heavily modified)

 

 

Shiloh Baptist moved to West Dayton 1941, (Sprague Street), which was probably around the time the plat was being turned into factories. In this 1950 Sanborn one can see industrial growth and scrap yards crowding out residential. New factories replace houses, or locate on open land that never saw a house.

 

 

This industry-replacing-housing pattern occurred at other locations in Dayton (McCall Printing on the west side is an example) and other Midwest industrial cities, such as Chicago, where industrial expansion replaced the older parts of the Cragin and Hanson Park neighborhoods, among others.

 

The only non-industrial structure surviving is this corner store. One can compare how vacant the pix looks to the houses lining the side street to the left.

 

 

 

And the old Acme Aluminum Alloy plant on Finley Street: Shiloh Baptist would've been midway down the building.

 

 

Industrial development also cleared the area to the south, between First and Springfield.

 

 

Diamond Street/Stockyards settlement

 

This was the largest East Side concentration, and also had one of the largest black concentrations as a % of a block.  Based on the dates of the first congregations it appears to have been the earliest on the East Side..

 

The history of this community is unclear.  The history prepared by the Dayton Dialogue on Race Relations says this community formed in the 1850s, but the 1869 Titus map and 1875 County Atlas give no indication of this, aside from the area being divided into market farms like most of the rest of close-in Mad River Township.  If there was a black settlement here it was not a platted rural village.

 

First plats appear in the 1880s, north of Springfield, and in 1901, the “Springdale Addition” (Diamond Avenue) was platted south of Springfield.

 

The first black churches quickly follow, with an ME congregation briefly forming on Springfield in 1911, and a mission from the old Third Zion Baptist on the Sprague Street in 1909, to become Mnt. Pisgah Baptist.

 

 

So this was a black settlement from the very beginning.

 

 

What’s interesting to speculate on is the possible connection with the Union Stockyards, which apparently replaced the Southern Ohio Stockyards in the near west side (which was subdivided in 1901, the same year as Diamond Ave). Not only did stockyards locate here, but also meatpacking. By 1919 three slaughterhouses were in operation.

 

Perhaps an employment center for the local black community?

 

Also around the turn of the century the Dayton Springfield & Urbana (DS&U) built down Springfield Street. It’s not known if the “Damned Slow & Uncertain” had local service, but it must have had a flag stop here for the stockyards.

 

Although platted 18 years earlier, in 1919 the neighborhood was still fairly sparse, yet one can see a church for the Mount Pisgah congregation

 

 

The church building shown on this 1919 Sanborn still exists . And note the evidence of neighborhood retail: corner stores at the alley and the Irwin/Springfield intersection, just above the church on the map:

 

 

The expanded Mnt. Pisgah. At the corner of Irwin & Diamond Avenue, looking east on Diamond.

 

 

Diamond Avenue houses. One can see two common Dayton vernacular types, the tall thin “urban I-house” and the sawed off shotgun (not as long as the southern version).

 

 

 

More Dayton “sawed-off shotguns”. It’s tempting to make the connection and say that since this was a black neighborhood forming during an era of in-migration from the South that the blacks brought this house style with them. I can’t say that, though, and I suspect this is a homegrown version of the shotgun house form, evolving out of the earlier workers cottage type.

 

Or it could have been a borrowing from the South as an expedient houseform for a growing working class population, as it was in Southern cities (most of the Dayton examples seem to be from around the turn of the last century)

 

 

(& note the traditional 19th century window trim around the lower one, which is sort of a local builders’ vernacular detail)

 

This pyramid roof house is also a type found in this area. The sparse development perhaps gives a feel of what this area was like when it was on the outskirts of town.

 

 

Springfield Street, in this area a mix of houses and small factories. Today the Mad River corridor is the industrial heart of Dayton, but mostly small shops.

 

 

More Springfield Street houses, showing some typical one and two story types. An illustration on how 19th century houseforms carried over into the early 20th.

 

 

The last of Pruden Street. This street is nearly all light industry, with these as the last houses. At the end of the street was a slaughterhouse and the stockyards

 

 

And the neighborhood today, from the air, showing some historical locations.

 

 

Modern connections are that Dayton artist Bing Davis lived on Diamond Avenue when he was young, and the old drovers hotel and office at the Union Stockyards is open today as the Stockyards Inn restaurant.

 

 

 

I've learned more about black Dayton than I ever thought I would, thanks to Jeffrey!

^

Your welcome...actually I'm not finished yet.  This ends around 1920, really, but I am going to look at later stuff too, when I get around to it.  I am kind of interested in that 5th Street "black business district", and then the impact of the "Second Great Migration".

 

 

 

Fantastic!

Well thought out and educational post.