© oac
Note the four period pole displays - c1853.
There were many barbers working in Columbia. This page will make efforts discovering who they were and discovering their shop locations.
1851 Where the J. M. Beam Building is (Towle and Leavitt) originally were 5 lots owned by Bernardo Cassaretto. Stephen Stewart who owned the west part has a barber shop.
1853 One of the first French barbers was Joseph Aime Bonnefoi.
Barber poles and shop signage - 1850s.
1854 Wm. Odenheimer and Thaddeus W. Northey buy the property. Odenheimer moves his Eagle Cottage boarding house to the property and into a larger building. It takes care of 100 boarders and has a barber shop in the northeast corner. After burning, it is rebuilt by July 23.
1856 Barton & Smith are listed as Barbers from New Orleans. (Miners & Business Men's Directory)
1856 Henry Saute listed as Barber from Germany. (Miners & Business Men's Directory)
1856? François Garrissere, was a laundryman and had a barber shop on the west side of Main Street. Listed in the 1860 census as Francwa(sic) Gaiese. (see below)
Advertising cuts - 1850s.
The association of the black men and the razor goes back to 1820 when they controlled the profession of shaving and hair cutting. As late as 1884, Chamber's Encyclopedia of New York stated, "In the United States the business of barbering is most exclusively in the hands of the colored population." San Francisco was home to sixteen black-owned barber shops as early as 1854, and during the 1860s, a former slave named Peter Briggs enjoyed a monopoly as the sole barber in Los Angeles. The owners of the following buildings with barber shops are not conclusively the barber. They rarely state that the owner is the barber. We can safely assume that many of Columbia's early barbers were black.
1859 Black Barbers, James Barker, age 32, from Tennessee (his wife Sophia, 24 years old, from Illinois, was a dress maker) and J. A. Cousins, 32 years old, from Virginia (his wife Justine, 21 years old, from New York) open a Shaving Emporium in the third building above Fulton Street on the west side of Main (the Temple Building).
1859 July - J. A. Cousins advertised as a barber.
1859 J. A. Cousins leaves the shop with James Barker and locates in the frame building south of the Wells Fargo building.
1859 Richard Henderson from Virginia (not married), a black barber, was in a shop on Fulton Street where Barker joined him. He received some notoriety when his brother William rescued a Columbia woman from a shipwreck they both happened to be aboard. She wrote a very grateful and sentimental letter to the paper.
1861 March - the Ferguson hotel owned by Westley, Wilder and Wheeler who remodel the building and change the name to "The Post Office Building" and open a bookstore and stationery in addition to the post office. The small store is rented to DuBois and Tally, barbers.
