Robert Gordon, a Black man who lived in Cincinnati from about 1847 through his death in 1884, makes occasional appearances in obscure historical accounts of nineteenth-century Cincinnati. He pops up in popular press accounts as a former slave who made a fortune in the coal business. Yet it turns out that Gordon left a considerable documentary trail in Cincinnati that allows a more subtle understanding of the man and his family and businesses.
Gordon’s origin story is a common one for free Blacks in Cincinnati. He began his life enslaved. His master, described as a Virginia coal merchant and a yachtsman, put Gordon in charge of the coal yard. He allowed the slave to have the “slack” – the coal dust that covered everything in the yard. Gordon managed to make the slack useful to industrial customers. There is no evidence how he processed and marketed the waste dust; if the process were obvious or simple it certainly would have been exploited by owners in a slave economy. He sold his product and saved, he bargained with his master to buy his freedom in 1846, and he set off for the free states.
Gordon found his way to Cincinnati. Most accounts say he arrived in 1847, although I have discovered no documentary evidence about him in the city until the next year. (To be sure, a transient freeman would be unlikely to leave much official trace.) On November 1, 1848 he paid the considerable sum of $2000 for property on the Miami Canal at Eighth and Lock Streets. It seems Gordon established his residence and a business office there.
On September 1849, Gordon married Eliza Jane Cressup. Not all the blanks on the recorded copy of marriage license record are filled in: Robert’s first name is recorded only with a squiggle, there is no notation even that both spouses were of legal age, and the name of the officiant is even more abbreviated than Gordon’s. Several other records in the same book omit similar information; it is likely that the copyist couldn’t make them out in the originals.
The 1850 census provides benchmark information on Robert Gordon’s presence in Cincinnati. The census form for the First Ward (which included the area on Eighth Street near the Canal) shows the household consisting of just Robert and Eliza. She was at that time 25 years old; her birthplace listed as Ohio, so she was free born. Robert set his age as 38, indicating he had arrived in Cincinnati in his mid-thirties. The box for value of real estate showed $2500; perhaps Gordon or the census-taker thought his house had appreciated, perhaps he had improved the property or made another small investment elsewhere. Already, in short, the Gordons enjoyed a comfortable middle-class existence by any standards, complete with a single-family home.
At about the same time as his marriage in the fall of 1849, Gordon set himself up as a coal dealer. The 1850 census confirms that occupation. The first advertisement for his business I have found appeared regularly in the weekly Catholic Telegraph newspaper beginning in late 1849 as “Robert Gordon & Co. Coal Yard, Sixth St., east of Broadway, near the Canal.” The business was two blocks south of his home. It was on the same side of the same block, at least, as the shop of the Black carpenter Thomas Crissup – whose name was spelled many different ways including Cressup. It seems likely that Gordon’s business was next to his father-in-law’s. Later real estate transactions indicate that Gordon assumed a lease on the coal yard property in October 1850.
The business progressed. In 1853 Gordon purchased the lot he had
leased in 1850 – officially at Sixth and Culvert, for $2,250. The 1860 census increased the value of his real estate to $4000. It is worth noting that the documented purchase prices of two properties at Sixth and Eighth on the Canal totaled $4200; the $2500 valuation in the 1850 census and the $2250 purchase in 1853 totaled closer to $5000 than $4000. For whatever reason, Gordon apparently undervalued his real estate for the Census-taker.
From the late 1840’s onward, the annual Williams Directory was the standard reference for personal and business names and addresses in Cincinnati. Robert Gordon’s first listings in the directory appear in the volume for 1850-1851: there is a personal entry at the Eighth Street property on the Canal, followed by a bold-faced business entry for the coal yard on the Canal at Sixth. The same directory further included a mention in the business category for “Coal Yards” – his was one of only a dozen listed. Scanning the directory for coal dealers turns up dozens more who did not opt for the category listing, indicating Gordon was a substantial and sophisticated business owner. Yet Gordon did not choose the most extravagant option: four yards on the Williams list had notation referring in addition to display ads; the yard on Sixth Street was not among them.
