Family Robbins

Beautiful family portrait of Henry B. Wade Robbins, along with his wife and two children.

Henry Wade Robbins is a native of Canada. His grandparents were enslaved. He has lived in Michigan thirty-one years, most of which time he has lived in Ann Arbor, where he has conducted a high class barber business, in which he has accumulated a considerable sized fortune, owning some of the best business property in the city of Ann Arbor, as well as some residence property and his barber business. Mr. Robbins has completely negatived the popular fallacy that in order to be successful in the barber business the boss was required to draw the color line in his patronage. This Mr. Robbins has never done. He treated all gentlemen alike and catered to high class trade, both white and colored, and he has numbered and still numbers among his patrons many of the best known white people in Michigan, as well as the higher class of colored people. Among his patrons are men exceedingly prominent in public life, Senators, Congressmen, State Officials, and Church Men. He is progressive, far beyond the average business man. Mr. Robbins is possessed of a common school education and resides in his cozy home in Ann Arbor with his wife and two children.

"Michigan Manual of Freedmen's Progress, By Michigan Freedmen's Progress Commission" (1915)