William Toler and Charles Lohman, circa 1890

William Toler

For a few weeks now I've been processing MSC 456, the Ruckman Family collection, at the Mercer Museum Research Library. The Ruckmans (and the Harts, with whom they intermarried) were a prominent family in Bucks County and Philadelphia, and there are a handful of other collections in the library that tie into this one. Last week, while searching through the Charles Swain collection (MSC 759), I found a series of beautiful cyanotype photographs. Many showed scenes in Solebury and Buckingham townships — including one of an enormous cow standing placidly in front of the stately Ruckman-Fell family home at Upper York and Greenhill roads in Lahaska — but two caught my eye because they were of black men.

Charles Lohman

 

We don't find many photographs of black people in our collections, especially older photographs (these are most likely from the 1890s). This is partially because central and upper Bucks County had a relatively small number of black residents, but also because when the Bucks County Historical Society was founded, and for a long time afterwards, it was run by well-to-do white men (including a Ruckman) who may not have considered them a part of history worth preserving. We have military stuff out the wazoo, and what feels like cubic miles of boxes containing papers of other well-to-do white men, but very few records of the lives of people of color. (Today the library is staffed almost exclusively by nerdy white women, and we're working hard to remedy that disparity.)

The men in the photos were identified: The photo of the seated older man was marked "Billy Toler" and the other, which showed a smiling man with a little dog, was marked "Charley 'tinker,' Charles Lohman." I scanned the photos (they were only about three inches square), edited them on my computer (they were faded), and did some cursory research.

The "Charley 'tinker'" label was confusing (was the man a Tinker, by trade? Was the dog named Tinker?) and I found no records of a Lohman family living in or around Bucks in the 1890s. "Billy Toler," however, wasn't as difficult.

William Toler (variably spelled Toller) was born around 1815 (his headstone at Mt Gilead Cemetery, the African Methodist Episcopal cemetery at the top of Buckingham Mountain, reads Oct 1815 to Jan 1902) in either North or South Carolina (census records differ). He was a Bucks County resident from at least 1880: On that year's US Census, he's 57 years old and living in the village of Clayton, Buckingham Township, with his wife Mary Ann, age 60, born in Maryland. The only child in the household is 10 year-old Harry Anderson (a number of black families with the surname Anderson appear on the 1880 and 1900 censuses for Buckingham). Harry is marked "at school," while Mary Ann is recorded as keeping house, and William as a day laborer.

In June 1900, the next available census (the 1890 US Census was destroyed), William, age 80, is a widower, living alone. Eighteen months later, he died. And for now, this is all I know.

Source: FindaGrave.com memorial 23905998