Abstract

"Black Wealth, Red Stone: Architectural Co-Creation by the Seneca Sandstone Company and the Freedman's Bank, 1869-1874"

Maxwell Smith-Holmes, Princeton University (ms9714@princeton.edu)

Narrating the history of the Seneca Sandstone Company in the years from 1869 to 1874, this paper investigates the co-creation of the built environment of Washington, DC, by both financial speculators and formerly enslaved African American customers of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company. From the Freedman’s Bank’s Washington headquarters – a building built with stone from the Seneca Quarry – the Board of Directors made a series of speculative and legally dubious loans to firms in which they were personally shareholders, including the Seneca Sandstone Company and other businesses involved with real estate and infrastructure development in the newly unified nation’s capital city. The Seneca Quarry’s distinctive red-hued stone was highly sought-after by architects and builders – still visible on the rusticated faces of the Smithsonian Castle – becoming a signature of the Victorian Gothic style which proliferated throughout mid- to late nineteenth century. Although the money for these loans came out of the Freedman’s Bank’s Washington vaults, it was placed there by Black workers who had deposited their savings at the bank’s thirty-six branches located throughout the American South and as far north as New York. When the Seneca Company defaulted on its loans, it was the Bank’s Black depositors whose money was on the line. High risk investments like those made to the Seneca Company ultimately led to the Bank’s gradual demise beginning in 1874, eventually erasing approximately $1.5 million (about $43 million in 2025) of hard-earned Black wealth, causing ripple effects for generations. The aesthetic value of Seneca stone stands in contrast with its economic toll on the accounts of the Freedman’s Bank and, by extension, those of generations of African American wage-earners. This paper reframes familiar narratives of the Freedman’s Bank’s rise and fall through the material history of Seneca sandstone, arguing that the downside risks of Black freedom are embodied in Washington’s edifices.