More than 300,000 people have been laid to rest in ​Mount Hope Cemetery since it opened in 1838. Some of them are internationally famous—Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass—and people come from far away to pay their respects.

I walk in Mount Hope a lot. I stop at Anthony’s and Douglass’ graves sometimes, but I admit: I’m more curious about people whose stories went silent when they died. And I’m not the only one. It seems every day there is news about another unlikely inventor, film director, or business person, usually a woman, whose accomplishments were forgotten after she was gone. 

There’s a woman buried in the cemetery I’ve been curious about for a long time. Her name was Lily J. Church Arvine. I ran across her name while researching the history of a house I lived in. The house is on Mt. Vernon Avenue near Highland Hospital. It’s part of the Ellwanger & Barry Tract, built on former nursery land. One of the documents related to the 1906 construction of the house listed her as the contractor. It struck me as unusual that a woman would be involved in the real estate development business in 1906, particularly as a contractor. But I really don’t know if it was. Maybe there were lots of them. Has anyone ever really looked into it?

I poked around online. Arvine was born in 1852, the youngest of three daughters in a well-off Rochester family. Her mother was Elizabeth Grant Church, born in Canada. Her father, Sidney Church, was a rope manufacturer who came to Rochester from Connecticut. 

Arvine married Freeling Arvine when she was in her 40s and established in her business. He was a scientist and inventor who perfected a process for using gasoline—once just a byproduct of crude-oil refining—as a fuel. Later he joined her in real estate.

When Sidney Church died he left his youngest daughter two acres of land between West Avenue and Clifton Street. Starting around 1891, Arvine successfully developed it into Churchlea Place, a middle-class neighborhood that attracted staff of the nearby St. Mary’s Hospital and businessmen from Bull’s Head. She and her mother lived at No. 1. The street is now partially redeveloped as part of the hospital campus, but some of the original houses remain.

Her obituary described her as an extensive real estate developer on the city’s west side. With the profits she made on Churchlea Place, Arvine went on to build homes on Algonquin Terrace, Child and Wooden Streets, and several streets near Ritter Dental Works on West Avenue. 

She also developed the Arvine Park Tract, three streets off Genesee Park Boulevard near Elmwood Avenue. Arvine picked locations primed for growth; this one was near the new University of Rochester River Campus and Genesee Valley Park. One of the streets, Arvine Heights, is a National Historic District listed in the National Register. Many homes on the street retain their original Bungalow, Dutch Colonial Revival and Colonial Revival characteristics popular in the 1920s.

Homes built at that time in many Rochester neighborhoods had deed stipulations preventing African Americans from living there. It’s likely that Arvine’s middle-class neighborhoods were among them, and I’m going to dig a little more to find out. “Restricted” was the code word used to describe this discriminating practice. It was not illegal, but it has had terrible repercussions for the Rochester region that continue to this day.

I don’t know, yet, how Arvine became the contractor for the house I lived in. Did she know the Blackalls, the family who had it built? Did she have an arrangement with Ellwanger & Barry Realty Co., which was developing the area?

Arvine retired in 1929. When she died in 1934 she left an estate of $10,000, about $180,000 in today’s dollars. Half of it went to her niece, Sarah Caldwell, and the other half went to her longtime housekeeper, Sadie MacPhee.

By the way, years after I learned about Arvine I just happened upon her grave on one of my walks in Mount Hope. She is buried next to her husband and her parents.

Sources: 
City of Rochester Historic Resources Survey 2000, cityofrochester.gov
Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, 18 Jan 1934, fultonhistory.com

If Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ name sounds familiar, it’s probably because she wrote The Yearling, the 1938 classic bestseller that earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1939 and became a movie starring Gregory Peck in 1946. But before she was a famous novel writer, Kinnan Rawlings was a newspaper reporter in Rochester. She was a features writer at the Journal American, a Hearst newspaper whose salacious approach to the news was considered a bit scandalous, though deliciously titillating, in conservative Rochester. 

Owner J. Randolph Hearst liked to shake things up and make a splash, and he did so in Rochester. Their offices were at 128 St. Paul Street, at the corner of Andrews. You can still see the marquis over the door. (Side note: Cook Iron Store moved into the space in the 1930s, shortly after the paper folded, and has been there ever since.) 

Before the world read Kinnan Rawlings’ books, women were reading her poetry. She wrote a column of light verse after she joined the staff at the Times Union, one of two Gannett newspapers in Rochester. Poetry, by men and women, was a regular feature in newspapers at the time. “Songs of a Housewife” ran six days a week for a couple of years and became so popular it was syndicated to 50 newspapers around the country. Her reflections on daily life for American women appeared just a few years after women had finally won the right to vote. In her twenties and coming into her own when she wrote them, Kinnan Rawlings tapped into a new sense of freedom and possibility that women were feeling at the time.

By the late 1920s, Marjorie and her husband, Charles, both journalists, were feeling restless in Rochester. They took a leap and bought a 72-acre farm in frontier Florida. Their new home provided a rich setting for her books to come.

But her time in Rochester was an important part of her growth as a writer. Her columns are an early peek at Kinnan Rawlings’ writing style and voice, and they reveal a lot about American popular culture. They were largely forgotten until the 1990s, when researchers resurrected them and published about half of them in Poems by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Songs of a Housewife.
Photo: State Archives of Florida

Fresh from the ‘Rochester Writers Who Found Fame’ file:
Mary Jane Holmes – No, her name doesn’t ring a bell. But she was a bestselling and prolific writer (39 popular novels as well as short stories, magazine series and novellas) in the late 1800s. She lived in Brockport from 1852 to 1907. She sold 2 million books in her lifetime, second only to Harriet Beecher Stowe, and wrote about gender roles, race, class, slavery and war. None other than ‘The Nation’ published her obituary:

“It is an eternal paradox of our world of letters that the books which enjoy the largest sale are barely recognized as existing by the guardians of literary tradition. Mrs. Mary Jane Holmes, who died Sunday at Brockport, N.Y., wrote thirty-nine novels with aggregate sales, it is said, of more than two million copies, and yet she had not even a paragraph devoted to her life and works in the histories of American Literature.”
​Photo: ca. 1865, SUNY Brockport / Emily Knapp Museum, Brockport NY

​Found Frank today! Burton Francis (Frank) Blackall was the dad in the Blackall family. He’s been hiding from me in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester. I knew what area he was buried in, but his headstone has eluded me for years.
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Early on, Frank used his position as a telegraph operator to support Frederick. In 1859, the abolitionist was out of town when he learned officials were looking for him in connection with John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. Frederick sent a telegram to Frank, then 26 years old, “a friend and frequent visitor at my house, who would readily understand the meaning of the dispatch: ‘B.F. Blackall, Esq., Tell Lewis (my oldest son) to secure all the important papers in my high desk,’” he wrote in his third autobiography. “I did not sign my name, and the result showed that I had rightly judged that Mr. Blackall would understand and promptly attend to the request.”

​Frank and Frederick had a long friendship, even after Douglass moved to D.C. Photo by Gia Lioi

Originally published 10/20/2013

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When Frederick Douglass moved from Rochester, NY, to Washington, DC, in 1872, he left behind a lot of friends and supporters. But he didn’t lose touch. In fact, his moving away means we can see the nature of those relationships more clearly through the letters he exchanged with them.

Frederick and his second wife, Helen Pitts Douglass, corresponded with the Blackalls for many years. For the most part they are cordial and chatty letters about everyday life - the weather, the health of family members, invitations to visit. They describe family gatherings - Fred playing violin with his grandson, the Blackalls vacationing on Frontenac Island on the St. Lawrence River. Some highlight big events, like the Chicago World’s Fair and President Garfield’s election, and others comment on the politics of the day.

Most of the letters between Burton F. (Frank) Blackall and Frederick were about business; Frank looked after rental properties that Frederick owned back in Rochester. Little has been written about Douglass the real estate investor, but he owned a fair number of properties. With these letters, it’s more than just his name on a plat map or deed. They show the typical wranglings of being a landlord - finding good tenants, fixing old pipes, collecting overdue rent. So far the letters I’ve tracked down are from Frank to Fred and show the mild frustration Frank went through being the go-between:

“I have held this money for several days in hopes that I could collect the rent due you from the Bond Street property and remit that also, but I am sadly disappointed as I know you will be also,” Frank wrote on Sept. 29, 1877. “The truth of it is that the tenant is a ‘dead beat.’ We will never be able to collect a cent from him. He is all packed up and ready to move out. The sooner he goes, the better.”
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Some things never change. I’ll write lots more on all the great letters I’ve found!

Originally published 9/27/2012

Filed under frederick douglass rochester ny Helen Pitts Douglass Blackall