By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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The original owner of this home was William Baylor, a free Black man who in June of 1863 established a barber shop on Commerce Street, as William Street was then named.
Baylor was one of 420 free Black people living in Fredericksburg at the time of the 1860 Census, according to a 1995 article in the Free Lance-Star. The city had the largest population of free Black residents at the time—there were 320 living in Stafford County and 150 in Spotsylvania.
Baylor was born enslaved to Alexander Baylor in Essex County. Included in a collection of Essex County’s Free Negro and Slave Records from 1714 to 1857, now at the Library of Virginia, is a deed of manumission from Alexander Baylor to “Matilda Gaines and her children William and Alexander.”
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According to research conducted by Sandra Staley for the Historic Fredericksburg Foundation’s marker program, the house still standing at 232 Princess Anne Street was built for Baylor in 1879. The value of the lot and building together was $500 at the time the house was completed.
Staley concludes from her research that there was a building on the property originally built in the 1850s, but it was destroyed during the Civil War.
Baylor opened his barbering business more than a decade before building his house, during “the roar of the greatest civil conflict of the century was beating around the little city of Fredericksburg,” a 1931 Free Lance-Star article about the 70th anniversary of Baylor’s shop reads.
The business lasted in the same location for more than 80 years. Ruth Coder Fitzgerald’s book “A Different Story” notes that according to an 1876 newspaper account, “Baylor’s Shaving and Hair Dressing Saloon” featured gas lighting, which was “a decided improvement” for its clientele, as well as a gramophone.
The shop was owned and operated by Baylor’s sons after he retired, and then by his grandsons until 1946, when it moved to a new location. “Many of us are inclined to sigh and shake our heads in sentimental reflection at the forthcoming removal of Baylor’s Barber Shop from its William Street location,” a 1946 Free Lance-Star article states. “For 82 years, this little shop has carried on in its modest way … and it has numbered the best people of Fredericksburg among its clientele. No other place is like it and there will never be another with its mellow characteristics.”
At the time, Baylor’s shop was “probably the oldest establishment in Fredericksburg which had ownership in the same family,” the 1946 article states.
When Baylor died in 1904, he owned 232 Princess Anne Street as well as property in Washington, D.C. The Fredericksburg house went to his wife, Sally, and then to his children and grandchildren.
His granddaughter Virginia Baylor Speaks, later Virginia Baylor Kay, was the sole owner by 1970, according to Staley’s marker research. Virginia Kay was married to Dallas Kay, who owned and operated Kay and Bailey Funeral Home and Kay Cleaners on Charles Street, in the buildings that later became artist Johnny Johnson’s studio.
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