Peter Ray

The father of Cornelia and Peter Williams Ray, Peter Ray was one of the black community’s most respected members. Born in 1800, he began working in Peter and George Lorillard’s tobacco company as an errand boy in 1811. When he died in 1882, he was one of the general superintendents in the company’s new factory in Jersey City. The Lorillards valued him as a worker, recognizing his skill as a "judge of leaf tobacco, and which will do best for snuff and which for cutting, for smoking and chewing tobacco," and rewarded accordingly.

Ray was also an important leader in the black community. He was active in the affairs of St. Philip’s since its inception, serving as the vestry’s senior warden for all but two years between 1843 and 1862. He also worked tirelessly on behalf of black education, cajoling the city's public school system into hiring black teachers.

NYPL ID number: 1800761
George Arents Collection

Manuscript Receipt Book. ca. 1825-ca. 1843/ Receipts, chiefly for curing tobacco and preparing snuff

circa 1842

The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Pierre Toussaint

Pierre Toussaint was one of the slaves that the Berards, a former grand blanc slaveholding family from St. Domingue, brought with them to New York when they fled the Haitian revolution. Emancipated in 1807, Toussaint became a hairdresser, built a thriving business, and bought property. He invested his profits in several of the city’s fire insurance companies and, when the great fire of 1835 struck, he lost ninety-five percent of his net worth, as much as $900,000 in today’s money. He slowly and patiently rebuilt all he had lost.

Toussaint was successful because he was a beneficiary of considerable white largesse. Despite the fact that he had been their slave, Toussaint remained loyal to the Berards and their circle of friends. In turn, they introduced him to many of the city's prominent families and he converted these relationships into a veritable money-making machine. Although Toussaint did work out of the salon in his home, the most lucrative part of his work came from home visits to elite families where he cut and styled their hair. As contract clients, they paid him a fixed annual sum for weekly visits. In his waning years, it’s possible that Toussaint wanted to pass on some of his specialized knowledge to a younger man like Peter Guignon.

Anthony Meucci

circa 1825

The New-York Historical Society

Patrick Reason

Patrick Reason was a classmate of Peter Guignon's at the Mulberry Street School. After his graduation, British born engraver, Stephen Henry Gimber, took Patrick into his shop for a four year apprenticeship “to learn the art, trade and mystery of an engraver,” paying his mother three dollars a week for his labor. It was during this period that Patrick did the no famous portrait of Peter Williams Jr. for St. Philip’s. He also designed a stipple engraving of a kneeling female slave with chains hanging from her wrists accompanied by the inscription “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?,” the counterpart of the famous Wedgwood seal of a kneeling male slave produced in Britain in the late 1780s.

By 1838, Patrick was doing well enough to advertise himself in the Colored American as a “Portrait and Landscape Engraver, Draughtsman and Lithographer.” In 1840, he gave Philip White an apprenticeship in his shop until it became apparent that Philip had no talent in this line of work. By the 1850s, Patrick had a shop on Bond Street, close to the homes of fashionable New Yorkers. He moved to Cleveland in 1869 and remained there for the rest of his life.

Pifer & Becker

NYPL ID number: 01SCCAB
Cabinet card collection

circa 1890s

Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations