The Robert R. Bellamy House.
​Of Eliza and John Bellamy's 10 children, Robert Rankin Bellamy (1861-1926) was the only one born in what is now the main house of the Bellamy museum at 503 Market St. He grew up in the house and became a successful drug store owner and pharmacist in downtown Wilmington. Robert had his own Queen Anne style home built next door to the original Bellamy mansion around 1895. ​Robert married Lilly Dale Hargrove (1862-1934) and they had one child, Hargrove Bellamy (1896-1994) in the house at 509 Market St. The picture below is approximately 1905. As you can see, it was a large and imposing structure. 

The Rachel Thompson house (513 Market St., far right in the historic image above and painted yellow in the present day image below) was bought by Robert Bellamy in 1890 as a rental property. He enlarged that house over time.

​Robert's house burned on Christmas Day in 1980 while in use as a home for children with disabilities, according to the local paper. At that time the building was known locally as the Tabb mansion. The building was lost but no-one was hurt. ​

The John D. Bellamy Jr. House.
One block away from the current museum site, at 602 Market St., sat the John D. Bellamy Jr. house. John Jr. (1854-1942) grew up in what is now the museum's main house. He was an attorney and politician whose election to the US House of Representatives was an integral part of the 1898 massacre and coup. Bellamy had acquired an imposing Italianate, James F. Post designed, 1858 house (Wright-Harriss-Bellamy) on the south east corner of 6th and Market sts. in the 1890s. Around 1899 he massively remodeled it in an extravagant, late Victorian, Queen Anne style. A tower, referred to locally as the ‘German helmet’, and decorative porches were added. The renovation, by noted local architect Charles McMillen, was equally grand on the inside. The local newspaper marveled at the elaborate oak, cherry, and mahogany interior woodwork, a ball room that was created on the top floor, and paneled silk, onyx fireplaces and tapestries by decorators Duryea and Potter of New York. 

​With financial support from Bellamy Mansion Museum board members, local 8th grade teachers were invited to the museum and offered a paid day of professional development. The conversation focused primarily on the enslaved individuals who had lived on the site and extended to the 1898 massacre and coup. The Bellamy site lends itself directly to the teaching of these local history topics. During the development session, teachers were offered a 90 minute tour, an 1898 presentation, resource guide materials, and museum staff perspectives on how to teach topics of historical slavery and race through the site.

"We had a great discussion and gained information about the topics to target and they how they can be paralleled with the curriculum content," Jen says. "In subsequent months, we rewrote our script to be appropriate and useful to the 8th grade classes."

Through this process, Jen notes, "we were also able to increase our collaboration with colleagues at the nearby Cape Fear Museum (CFM). CFM has an 1898 field trip at a similar time of year that includes a mapping activity and timeline of events. The Bellamy site and CFM's artifacts and documentation blend well into a more complete picture of this period of history and the themes that arise. The new partnership has widened our reach within the county. From our day with local teachers, we learned that it is difficult for them to complete a field trip that isn't a full day out of their school building. Now, with students attending both museum locations, they experience a fuller, more versatile field trip, and learn in buildings where enslaved people once lived and worked."  

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Bellamy staff is supporting further efforts to educate teachers not only locally, but across the state by participating in symposiums held by the North Carolina History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction out of Fayetteville, NC. With instruction coming from local historians, including Leslie Randle-Morton, associate director of the Bellamy Museum, the center held a two-day symposium last month in Wilmington. 

The purpose of the symposium is to teach historical perspectives on the war - its central point being that it was fought to preserve the system of enslavement. The Center reinforces this proven fact and ensures today’s school children learn the truth about the motivations behind the Civil War. The overall mission of the NC History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction is to tell the stories of all North Carolinians and create a comprehensive, fact-based portrait of history that spans the Antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods.

The Center is planning to hold a total of 12 symposiums as a lead up to the opening of a state historic site at the Fayetteville Arsenal where U.S. General William Tecumseh Sherman destroyed the Confederate Army’s ability to make weapons. Once the center is complete, which is expected in 2027, it will be turned over to the state and be housed within the museums division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Bellamy family members had formed a charitable corporation in 1972 named Bellamy Mansion, Inc. to assure the preservation and restoration of the site. However, that year arson in the main house caused this undertaking to be vastly more costly and complex than anyone could have anticipated. Meanwhile, PNC was oriented toward finding private buyers who would restore needy properties into homes or adaptive uses such as offices or B&B’s. They were not really in the business of museums, but the Bellamy site offered a unique challenge and opportunity.

In my younger years, I liked newer buildings: hit them and go. But I realized, in my older years, it is a challenge to go in something like the Bellamy Mansion, a building that is 150 years old. You have to get into the minds of those plasterers and they’re dead. If you don’t, you can’t redo what they’ve done.

Now, to John Doe it might not mean a thing. But for me to go in there and take this stuff that is damaged by fire and time and restore it identical, that’s a challenge.

He described his perfectionism to museum staff as standing in the center of the room, staring at the plaster, climbing up and down a ladder to retouch with a putty knife, for hours, inch by laborious inch, to get it right. A wood and metal template fabricated by the team, and used to get the curvature of crown molding, was one sign of Mr. Hill's aim to do this work in a similar manner to the original plasterers. William Hill (pictured below in 2008) worked on hospitals, city halls, courthouses, jails, schools, banks, theaters, and churches. His work can be found in buildings on the campuses of both UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State, and his plasterer's tool is forever immortalized in the Bellamy Museum northwest library. He died in 2022, aged 92.

(Sources: Wilmington News article “Fire Hits Bellamy Mansion,” March 14, 1972; Catherine W. Bishir’s “The Bellamy Mansion”; Kenneth Robert Janken’s “The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and the Rise of Black Politics in the 1970s”)

The Bellamys moved into the home with their eight children, who ranged in age from a 19-year-old daughter, Belle,  to 18-month-old Chesley. Primary care of the youngest Bellamy children was the responsibility of Joan, an enslaved wet nurse and nanny. Joan’s young daughter, Caroline, was described in a family memoir as matriarch Eliza Bellamy’s “little maid” who followed her “foot to foot.” She likely helped Mrs. Bellamy with her morning routine while Joan roused and tended to the Bellamy children.

As coachman, Guy cared for the carriage as well as the horses. Each morning he prepared to drive Dr. Bellamy to his properties, or take Mrs. Bellamy and the children to visit friends or relatives. He ran errands in town and needed written permission from the Bellamys to legally purchase goods. Laws regulated where and when enslaved people could go, with whom they could do business, and with whom they could spend their leisure time. Wilmington’s slave owners nevertheless often disregarded the laws if it benefitted them.

Similar to the image of an enslaved worker shown at left, ​Rosella spent most of her 16-hour workdays as a laundress. She washed and dried linens and clothing for the Bellamys and their guests in the slave quarters’ laundry room. She was likely assisted by Mary Ann; together they ironed in a basement room in the mansion. The youngest enslaved girls likely helped carry laundry bundles and fold napkins.

The slaves used these exterior stairs to move between the mansion’s floors as their daily work required. The enslaved women and girls who were not preoccupied with the Bellamy children, meal preparations, or laundry spent their afternoons climbing the slave stairs as they cleaned, dusted, polished silver, and readied the mansion for guests.

Guy served the evening meal, while Caroline used a “shoo fly” to ensure diners’ meals were insect free. They would then tend to the needs of the family and their guests after dinner in the parlors while Sarah tidied the kitchen and Mary Ann washed dishes. Joan put the Bellamy children to bed, and after all guests left for the night, the slaves retired to their bed chambers. Their workday ended around 10 o’clock, but they were on-call 24 hours a day. After a few hours’ slumber, the market house bell rang and another day began.
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Source: Bellamy Mansion Museum Slave Quarters Exhibit.​

​A complex water system allowed water captured from trough roof gutters to be pumped from a cistern under the back yard to supply running water within the house. The careful arrangement of doors and windows and vents brought cooling breezes from the shaded porch up through the house and out through the belvedere. Separate service zones and a back porch service staircase gave discreet access to the work yard, carriage house, and slave quarters at the rear.

Although free Black and enslaved artisans built much of Wilmington’s architecture at the time, the Bellamy house was singled out by observers as having been constructed principally, if not entirely, by local Black workmen, including carpenters, masons, plasterers and interior finishers. Moreover, to a degree unusual in antebellum construction projects, the names of many of them have been identified. Among them were William Gould, Henry Taylor, George Price Sr. and Jr., Elvin Artis, Alfred and Anthony Howe, and members of the Sadgwar and Kellogg families.

William B. Gould I was born into slavery but escaped to his freedom in 1862 where he went on to join the Union Navy and fought against the Confederacy for the remainder of the Civil War. Three days after his escape from Wilmington he began writing a diary that he would keep for the duration of his service, and his diary is the only one known to exist that was penned by a member of the Union Navy who was an escaped slave. Gould is one of the known antebellum artisans who helped with construction of the Bellamy house, and it may have been one of his last projects in the South as an enslaved plasterer.

In 2002, William B. Gould's great-grandson, William B. Gould IV, published the diary, titled "Diary of a Contraband" because the escaped slaves taken aboard the Union blockading ship were considered missing contraband rather than missing people. On the cover of the book is a striking photograph of a bespectacled Gould with a greying goatee and a perfect Windsor knot in his silk tie. 

The cover image is a closeup of a cabinet card taken at the Beckford photography studio in Boston, Massachusetts, and possibly the first photograph taken of Mr. Gould. ​This image of Mr. Gould is not the only one used at the Bellamy Museum in the interpretation of his story, but it is the one used most frequently. Staff and volunteers could recognize it from one thousand yards, but the year it was taken and the photographer who captured his stoic portrait had not come up as a topic of research.

Over the last few years, Mr. Gould's story of enslavement, escape, enlistment, and entrepreneurship has begun to finally receive more regional and national recognition. Here in Wilmington, a state highway marker dedicated to Gould was installed in front of the Bellamy Museum in 2018. Plans to rename a park in Dedham, Massachusetts, the town Mr. Gould and his wife Cornelia settled in after the Civil War, came to fruition in September 2021 when the East Dedham Passive Park was renamed the William B. Gould Park, and his life story and obituary were featured in a "New York Times" article in June 2022. The grassroots organization responsible for much of this is the William Gould Memorial, and after years of planning and fundraising, the group just unveiled a life-size bronze statue of Mr. Gould situated in the park that now bears his name. 

Bolivian-born artist Pablo Eduardo studied photographs of Gould to create the memorial, and though depicting an older man that the one in the Beckford photograph, many features from that photograph jump out when looking at the clay model on the left--from the hairline to that Windsor knot in the tie. 

The Beckford photograph of this brilliant man and stalwart patriot is, to us, iconic and central to telling Mr. Gould's story, but I had never stopped to ask myself, "Who was Beckford? When was the photograph taken? What, if anything, could knowledge of the photographer help illuminate about Gould himself?"

What follows is a brief biography of David C. Beckford, a "colored" immigrant who went from working odd jobs when he arrived in the United States at age sixteen to one of the most renowned photographers in New England by the time he was in his mid-thirties. Ironically, no photograph of David C. Beckford is known to exist.

David C. Beckford (c. 1855-unknown) was born in Jamaica, West Indies, to William and Catharine Beckford. David sailed to America in 1872 around the age of sixteen, and he worked various jobs including as a claerk and cook in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1881, at the age of twenty-seven, David married Elvira P. Gott of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and in 1882 David became a naturalized American citizen. 

Sometime after becoming an American citizen, David went to work for Boston based Chickering Photography Company--established in the early 1870s--and around 1891 David C. Beckford took over the studio and renamed it Beckford's Photo Studio.

In a short time, Beckford's studio was renowned, and he employed four assistants. An 1892 publication, Boston: its Finance, Commerce, and Literature, called his studio "one of the best in the country" stating his portraits were "unsurpassed by any other house in New England."

A client could have their photograph hand-colored with "crayon, pastel, water colors, India ink, and oil." A Directory of Massachusetts Photographers states Beckford's studio was in operation until 1909, and it may be at that point David C. Beckford moved back to Jamaica.

Beckford was not only an entrepreneur in America, but he also maintained a hardware store in Kingston, Jamaica. He sailed back and forth between Boston and Kingston conducing business, and a 1905 passenger manifest from the ship Admiral Farragut lists David as the only "Colored" passenger aboard that voyage. 

In 1907, the island of Jamaica suffered a 6.2 magitude earthquake--the epicenter of which was Kingston. It was one of the deadliest earthquakes in recorded history with around 1,000 people losing their lives. Every building in Kingston was damaged or destroyed including Beckford's hardware store and other properties.

What became of David and Ella Beckford after 1909 is currently uknown. There are no death or burial records for either, and there is no evidence they had any children. It is plausible they moved back to Jamaica after the earthquake where they remained.

David C. Beckford was a successful Black businessman in two countries. There were very few Black photographers in America when Beckford took the photograph of William B. Gould I around 1892-1895. It's quite a fascinating vignette to imagine this escaped slave turned Naval officer sitting for his portrait in a busy Boston studio operated by a young, up and coming Black immigrant. 

Written by Leslie Randle-Morton, Associate Director of the Bellamy Mansion Museum.

In 1886, a Black state teachers’ association demanded that people of color be admitted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This caused anti-Black sentiments to skyrocket in North Carolina. Former slave holders did not want their former enslaved workers and descendants to be in school with their own children and grandchildren. Despite the rise in White supremacist and anti-Black sentiments, Henry Eppes, another Black senator from Halifax County,  proposed a bill for a college for Black citizens of North Carolina in 1887. He asked for $10,000 in funding the first year and $1,000 annually thereafter. It was rejected 37-1. In 1889, there were two additional attempts by Black legislators to pass a bill creating an agricultural and mechanical college for Black North Carolinians, yet they both failed as well.  ​

​It was not until the U.S. Congress passed the second Morrill Act in 1890 that White members of North Carolina’s General Assembly began to take seriously the notion of establishing a university for Black students. The first Morrill Act of 1862, set aside federal lands to create colleges to “benefit agricultural and mechanical arts.” It gave each state 30,000 acres of land to be distributed by state senators and representatives. This act was directly responsible for the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts-- known today as North Carolina State University. With the passing of the second Morrill Act, the U.S. Congress prevented federal dollars being distributed to states that did not have integrated institutions of higher education or at least a separate college for Black students. The 1890 Morrill Act allocated $15,000 to each state, which increased yearly by $1,000 for 10 years until it reached a maximum of $25,000 per annum. One stipulation was that the annual appropriations had to be divided equally between Black and White schools in states that maintained segregated universities.  ​

In 1890, Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble sent letters to North Carolina Governor Daniel G. Fowle asking three questions pertaining to agricultural colleges in North Carolina: Are there agricultural and mechanical colleges in North Carolina? If so, are they segregated? And if they are segregated, are there colleges for both White and Black students? Governor Fowle responded saying there was a university-- North Carolina State University—but it was segregated, and there was no equitable university for Black students. Secretary Noble then notified Governor Fowle that since there was no college for Black students, North Carolina did not qualify for the funding established in the Morrill Acts. Governor Fowle then notified the state legislature that for this reason, and this reason only, North Carolina needed to establish a Black agricultural and mechanical college. ​

On January 9, 1891, Isaac Alston, a Black legislator representing the 19th District of Warren County, introduced SB12 which would establish a Black college in North Carolina, but it was promptly denied. On March 5, 1891, John D. Bellamy Jr. sponsored SB12, where it easily passed its first, second, and third readings and was ordered enrolled by the House of Representatives the following day, March 6th. So why did the General Assembly deny all previously sponsored or introduced bills? A likely contributing factor was that every representative who had-- O’Hara, White, Alston-- were Black. John D. Bellamy Jr. was White. The Morrill Act of 1890 also backed North Carolina into a corner: either establish a Black college or lose all federal funding for the colleges already established. The state Senate had not wanted to support higher education for Black students, evidenced by their refusal to pass previous bills for Black universities proposed by Black Senators, but the idea of losing all federal funding for UNC-CH and NC State caused a swift about-face.  ​

On March 9, 1891, the North Carolina General Assembly founded the Agricultural and Mechanical College for the Colored Race—now known as A&T University. Since its founding, A&T University has been recognized as a premier university in North Carolina. The university’s second president, James B. Dudley, was from Wilmington. John Jr. bragged Dudley’s appointment by the General Assembly was a “compliment” to himself.  In 1928, the university opened its’ doors to female students. And in 1945, then First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited the campus. A&T University has won seven HBCU football national championships, and notable alumni include Rev. Jesse Jackson, astronaut Ronald McNair, and United States Army Nurse Corps Clara Leach Adams-Ender. ​

The university eventually played an important an role in the American Civil Rights Movement, and Greensboro became nationally known for both peaceful protests and violent clashes. On February 1, 1960, four A&T students: Ezell Blair, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, and David Richmond sat-in at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, an all-White restaurant, beginning the nationally known Greensboro sit-ins that lasted until July of 1960 and spread to many other segregated cities in the South. In 1969, the university was involved in the 1969 Greensboro Uprising, wherein the National Guard infiltrated the university after mass protests erupted over a student body election at the nearby all-Black James B. Dudley High School. The event has been described as “the most massive armed assault ever made against an American university” which left two A&T students dead and eighteen injured. Bellamy likely could never have imagined how prestigious the university would become nor the impact A&T would make on the Civil Rights Movement as a whole though he remained proud of his part in founding the university until his death. ​

In John Jr.’s 1942 autobiography, Memoirs of an Octogenarian, which he wrote during his last year of life, he boasted that, “many other bills...were passed” during his time in the General Assembly, but he only went into detail about his role in establishing A&T University explaining he “drafted the charter for the Negro Agricultural College at Greensboro.”  John Jr. never explicitly stated why he suddenly supported SB12; if he was taking it on because he truly believed in a need for a Black college or if he was simply supporting it to secure federal funding for other colleges, but it is most likely at the intersection of myriad reasons he chose to support SB12. Regardless his motivations, the outcome is that A&T University is celebrating 130 years as North Carolina’s first institution for higher education for Black students, and we at the Bellamy Museum say, “Go Aggies!!” ​