1898 house was part of a vibrant African American pocket neighborhood in downtown Fredericksburg.
This week we look at another house in the 1300 block of Charles Street in downtown Fredericksburg, which was one of several “pocket” African American neighborhoods in the city for much of the 20th century.
1309 Charles Street was built in 1898 for Arthur Lawson, a wagon driver, according to research conducted by Richard Hansen for the Historic Fredericksburg Foundation’s marker program.
Lawson’s father, Joseph Lawson, a cooper with his own barrel-making business, bought the lot in 1889 for $75. He’d had a contract on it for nine years and when he bought it, he still owed $36. It was one of four lots that had been owned as investments by Thomas Arnold, a King George doctor.
Lawson was a freedman who had lived in Fredericksburg since before the Civil War. His description of the bombardment of Fredericksburg appears in the 1915 book Battleground Adventures by Clifton Johnson, as he told it to the author.
The Lawsons were among four Black families who built houses on the Arnold lots between 1883 and 1898. According to the marker report, the area of Charles Street “drew many laborers,” being near the canal, the mills in the north end of town, and Charles Hunter’s plow works.
In 1895, Joseph Lawson’s son, Arthur, paid the $36 that his father still owed to Thomas Arnold for the lot and became its owner. He built a two-story house—a bedroom over a living room—on the property and lived there with his wife Dora, who according to a 1912 Daily Star article had plans to open a restaurant.
Arthur Lawson sold the house in 1920 and it was rental property for seven years until Phillip Noel, “an African American laborer,” bought it in 1927 for $1,900.
Phillip Noel and his wife Annie had nine children and either the elder Noels or their children lived in the house all the way through 2003.
The last female Noel to live in the house was Ellen Noel, who was a reading teacher at Maury School in Fredericksburg. In 1970 she was named Teacher of the Year by the Fredericksburg Jaycees. In a Free Lance-Star article about the award, Noel described her efforts to motivate her students, to include promising them $5 if they made the honor roll, “even if she has to go to the bank to get enough to pay off.”
In addition to teaching, Ellen Noel “coordinated study programs for area churches, directed a community vacation Bible school, and holds [memberships] in the NAACP, the Fredericksburg Education Association, and the Cosmopolitan Club.”
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