Elizabeth A. Gloucester: The Wealthiest Black Woman in America

Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

With a fortune built largely from operating boarding homes in Brooklyn and beyond, Elizabeth A. Gloucester was considered by many to be the richest black woman in America at her death at age sixty-six on August 9, 1883.

Attending her funeral was “a congregation of people such as has seldom come together,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, made up of “richly dressed white ladies, fashionably attired gentlemen and a number of well-known colored people.”

Whether her fortune of about $300,000 (the equivalent of about $7 million today) actually made her the nation’s wealthiest black woman may be impossible to prove.

But Gloucester was notable for more than just her money. She was linked — for a time dangerously so — to the antislavery firebrand John Brown, whom some blamed for leading the nation into the Civil War. She also led efforts to raise money for New York’s Colored Orphan Asylum, which would be set afire in the deadly draft riots of 1863. In her final year she even managed to land a cameo role in a high-society scandal that made headlines across the country.

Though The New York Times did not, for whatever reason, take note of Gloucester’s death, it did bring up her “richest” reputation seven years later in a brief obituary about her husband, the Rev. James N. Gloucester.

Elizabeth Amelia Parkhill was born in 1817 in Richmond, Virginia, to a freedwoman who may have served as a cook. Little, if anything, exists regarding her father’s identity, but census records listed Elizabeth as “mulatto,” suggesting that she had white ancestry.

Her mother died when she was young. She was then placed in the Philadelphia home of the Rev. John Gloucester Sr., who founded America’s first African-American Presbyterian church. His youngest son would become Elizabeth’s husband in 1836, and they would have eight children, two of whom died before reaching adulthood.

They soon moved to New York, then a separate city from Brooklyn. James Gloucester “did not have a dollar in the world, but he had a good education, and a good-looking, business-like wife,” The New York World later wrote.

Elizabeth Gloucester began selling secondhand clothing, and then ran a furniture store on West Broadway. Acquiring boarding homes, which often offered furnished rooms, may have been a natural next step. She would eventually run 15 or more of them.

Her husband took a teaching job in New York but soon moved into the ministry and, in 1849, founded the Siloam Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn (which still stands). Elizabeth Gloucester helped pay to build it. The family moved to Brooklyn in 1855.

In 1857, after hearing John Brown lecture in Brooklyn, the Gloucesters invited him to stay with them whenever he was in town. By then, Brown had already drawn blood for the abolitionist cause when he led an attack on a proslavery settlement in Kansas.

The Gloucesters marveled at Brown’s spirit, the historian Stephen B. Oates wrote in a 1970 biography of Brown, “To Purge This Land by Blood,” and “promised to help him raise money and enlist support among New York City’s 15,000 black residents.”

Brown was apparently so impressed by Elizabeth Gloucester that he told her, “I wish you were a man, for I’d like to have you invade the South with my little band.”

She responded with concern, “Perhaps you will lose your life.”

He replied that he was an old man; his life wasn’t worth much.

Soon after, in hopes of inciting a slave rebellion, Brown and his men raided the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia, but they were quickly overwhelmed. In all, 16 people died in the assault, including two of Brown’s sons. Brown was hanged on Dec. 2, 1859.

Found in his carpetbag after his capture were many letters from his supporters, including one from Elizabeth Gloucester. It had come with a small contribution and had been personally delivered by Frederick Douglass, also a longtime friend of the Gloucesters’.

Some of those named in the letters feared prosecution or worse, but no harm came to the Gloucesters.

Elizabeth Gloucester soon turned her attention to helping the Colored Orphan Asylum, taking a leading role in an elaborate fund-raising fair.

The newspaper The Weekly Anglo-African gave the event glowing coverage, singling out Gloucester’s delegation for wearing nearly identical striped calico gowns.

But The Eagle seemed dismissive of the gathering. Apparently referring to Gloucester, it said, “The principal table is presided over by a big old colored lady, as downright in earnest as if she was disposing of clam-soup in Fulton Market.” Putting aside its racist tone, the article may have actually left us a portrait of Gloucester at her best: energetic, focused, in charge — and making lots of money.

Three years later, with the Civil War well underway, the Orphan Asylum, at 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, was set afire and destroyed during the riots that had erupted over the institution of a military draft. The children escaped without injury.

Some years after the war, Gloucester spent a reported $3 million in today’s dollars to buy the elegant building that housed the Hamilton Club, an elite gathering place, at Remsen and Clinton Streets in Brooklyn Heights.

The structure, which was renamed the Remsen House and later paired with an adjoining structure, was repurposed as a boardinghouse, attracting an affluent, largely white clientele. The Gloucesters made it the family’s home as well, and Elizabeth became its live-in landlady. Community groups sometimes held meetings there; Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and her brother, the clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, were said to be in attendance.

In early 1883, Elizabeth Gloucester, was ailing with congested lungs.

The Remsen House kept operating for a time after her death under the direction of two of her daughters; it has long since been demolished.

Of course, wealth could not entirely shield Gloucester from the sting of discrimination. That was made clear three years after her death, when her name surfaced in an Eagle article concerning criticism of a “color line” in place at the Park Theater in Brooklyn.

In defending the policy to a reporter, the theater’s owner, Col. William E. Sinn, recalled confronting Gloucester one evening when she had arrived with two tickets for the orchestra section.

“I called her aside in the lobby and told her that I would rather she would not use those seats and I would refund the money,” he said, “as many of my patrons objected to sitting in that part of the house with colored people.”

Gloucester became indignant, but “decided I was right,” Colonel Sinn insisted, after he asked if she would allow a black couple to “sit at the table with her white boarders.”

It was all, he concluded, just a matter of business.

Source: NY Times article written by Steve Bell (Sept. 2019) w/ contributed research by Alain Delaquérière