Information about Buxton, Iowa by Rachelle Chase
Rarely do I find photos of Buxton I’ve never seen before. Rarer still do I find them in my inbox. But today I did, thanks to Alisa Corstorphine. “I didn’t know if they were unique but I knew they were important,” said Alisa, referring to the Buxton images. After going through her mother’s photos and […]
While anxiously awaiting Netflix’s release of “Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madame C.J. Walker,” the question popped into my head, “Had Madam C.J. Walker ever visited Buxton, Iowa?” The question was a plausible one. People—especially African Americans—beyond Iowa had heard of this amazing town. Buxton was a coal mining town of 5,000 residents […]
Lottie Armstrong Baxter, a daughter of successful African American businessman Hobe Armstrong, was born in Muchakinock, Iowa in March 1876. When she was fifteen, she graduated from a business school and began her career with the Consolidation Coal Company, first working as a secretary for superintendent J.E. Buxton. On February 27, 1901, she married John […]
While researching how African Americans ended up being 55% of the population in Buxton, Iowa—which was established by Consolidation Coal Company—I did not expect to discover that one of the men who’d recruited African Americans to work in the company’s mines was Major Thomas Shumate, a Confederate officer. Within five to six years of establishing […]
“At a revival we used to have, I remember this little boy was preaching,” said Gertrude Stokes, an African American resident of Buxton, Iowa. “He used to wear a little white robe. He ran our revival and that’s when I joined the church.” The little boy was eight-year-old Lonnie Lawrence Dennis. On November 16, 1902, […]
Leroy Wright, an African American resident of Buxton, Iowa in the early 1900s stated that Jack Brookins, also African American, invented a railroad signal. “He made a patent on the railroad trap out of a mouse trap and they tried to get people to take out shares but they wouldn’t do it but it […]
In 1906, Robert Gilbert Wells, an African American author and publisher in Buxton, Iowa ran ads soliciting agents to sell his new book, “Anthropology Applied to the American White Man and Negro.” The ad placed in the March 3, 1906 issue of the Richmond Planet provided a summary of the book: AGENTS WANTED. To […]