Early Years
Green was born enslaved in Petersburg probably late in the 1830s. He was the son of Amos Green and Gracie Green. Little is known about his early life and he most likely gained his freedom at the end of the Civil War. The 1870 census recorded him as thirty-two years old and living in Petersburg with a woman name Susan Green, probably his wife. He reported to the enumerator that he worked in a tobacco factory, that he was literate, and that he held $150 in real estate property. The previous year he had acquired, with a woman named Rebecca Peniston, a lot on Rome Street. They worked together again in 1875, with Green acting as trustee for the remarried Rebecca Patterson and her children. He also co-owned at least two lots in the city, later purchasing one outright. Petersburg city directories in the mid-1870s listed Green as a grocer.
Office of the Principal of Armstrong High SchoolBrown’s two children who reached adulthood, Bessie Gwendola Brown and George Willis Brown, joined the family business. The Browns, whose slogan was “Makers of Portraits That Please,” became the most important visual chroniclers of Richmond’s African American population, producing thousands of studio portraits and documenting community life at schools, sporting events, and fraternal meetings. The studio produced pictures for schools and institutions throughout the state, including Virginia Union University, Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute (later Virginia State University), Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University), Saint Paul’s Industrial School (later Saint Paul’s College) in Lawrenceville, and the Virginia Industrial School for Girls. The
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Richard Ratcliffe Farr was born on November 30, 1845, in Fairfax County and was the son of Richard Ratcliffe Farr, who died about ten weeks before he was born, and Margaret Conn Willcoxon Farr, who reared him and his elder brother. During the Civil War, he and his mother lived as refugees in Washington County after the Second Battle of Manassas in August 1862. On November 2, 1863, he enlisted as a private in Company B of the 43rd Virginia Cavalry Regiment, under the command of John Singleton Mosby. One year later Farr was severely wounded in the thigh, but he recovered and served until paroled in Winchester in April 1865.
Early Years
Davis was born of mixed-raced ancestry probably during the 1820s. His mother may have been Vina Roane, who resided in his household in 1880, but his birthplace and his father’s name are unknown. He may have been the freeborn John Davis who was about twenty-seven years old in March 1847 when his name appeared in a Lynchburg register of free blacks or the John Davis, formerly the slave of M. Omohundro, who was enumerated with his wife, Ann, among the city’s black population in 1865. Davis married Ann Eliza Stuart, a tobacco stemmer, sometime between April 1, 1863, and July 27, 1870, when the couple lived near Lynchburg, in Campbell County. Most likely they did not have children.