Lomax B. Smith (d. 8 September 1877), barber, was born early in the 1800s possibly in Caroline County, but little is known about his early life including whether he was born into slavery or was born free. According to later newspaper accounts, he arrived in Richmond about 1818. He worked for a free Black barber named William Reynolds, who owned a shop in the Eagle Tavern and trained Smith in the tonsorial skills of the barbering trade. Smith became a fully licensed barber and later claimed to have shaved the marquis de Lafayette at the Eagle Tavern during Lafayette's 1824 tour of the United States, which included a stop in Richmond. When the Eagle Tavern burned down in 1839, Smith relocated to the Exchange Hotel, where he opened his own barbershop that catered to the city's wealthy white businessmen and politicians.
Smith was generally referred to using his middle initial, but a middle name of Boswell appears once in a Richmond city deed book. The 1840 census listed one enslaved female in the Smith household, and the following year he purchased property for $131. By 1850 he was married to a woman named Nancy (surname unknown), with whom he raised two adopted daughters and with whom he had at least two more daughters and a son who might not have lived to adulthood. In 1850 he reported to the census enumerator $2,000 in real estate property and a decade later $1,500 in real estate and $500 in personal property.
Among nineteenth century urban Black entrepreneurs, no business was more popular or profitable than the barbering profession. Free Black barbers were not only at the top of Richmond's Black economic scale, but they were also well-connected across the African American community through extended households, the apprentice system, and fraternal organizations such as the Odd Fellows. Prior to the Civil War, Richmond's Black barbers helped create a thriving free Black community. Some established lavish operations, replete with upholstered chairs and gilt-framed mirrors, offered luxury services that appealed to their clients, most of whom were white. Smith published a newspaper advertisement in 1852 inviting potential clients to visit his establishment in the basement of the Exchange Hotel where he could give "their Heads either a fashionable or a classical expression." Smith described his skills in the fine art of hair cutting as "the skillful arrangement of those luxuriant tresses with which nature has decorated the seat of human intellect."
Frederick Douglass and other Black leaders criticized what they perceived as the servile nature of the barber's work, suggesting it was no different than the subservience of the enslaved to their enslavers. Many barbers responded to their critics by pointing out the benefits that their businesses and wealth created for the Black community. Smith did not shy away from interacting with the city's white community. In 1829, when the Richmond Light Infantry Blues recruited free Blacks to form a martial band, Smith and other barbers answered the call. The Blues Band, as it was known, was active for only a few years, but Smith and other band members participated in Light Infantry Blues events as honored guests for the rest of their lives. After the Civil War, leaders of the Blues lauded Smith among others for not attending celebrations by the city's Black residents on the anniversary of the United States Army's arrival in Richmond in April 1865.
Although many Black barbers contributed financially to local institutions such as churches and mutual aid societies, some also distanced themselves from racial reform activities deemed objectionable to their white clientele. When the abolitionist John Brown was being held in 1859 for execution after his raid on Harpers Ferry, Smith publicly expressed his disapproval of antislavery activists and reportedly visited Richmond's mayor to volunteer to raise a company to "shear the ears from some abolition heads." When Smith lost two tenements and two business buildings (as well as the bed frame on which the marquis de Lafayette had reportedly once slept) to fire in 1866, some of the city's prominent white residents reportedly offered to raise money to assist him.
A well-known member of his community, Smith was one of several Black men named as veniremen for the petit jury of the United States Circuit Court for the District of Virginia at the November 1867 session when it was anticipated that former Confederate States president Jefferson Davis would be tried for treason. At the court's session in November 1868, Smith was sworn in as a member of the grand jury. When concerned residents organized in 1867 to restore the cemetery of the Burying Ground Society of the Free People of Color of the City of Richmond, Smith was elected president of the new society that renamed the cemetery Cedarwood.
As white barbers entered the profession in the decades after the Civil War, the special status Black barbers had enjoyed from their white clientele began to disappear. Smith and others who had linked themselves closely to the Confederate cause likely suffered low patronage from Black residents. Still, at the time of the 1870 census Smith valued his real estate property at $2,000 and his personal estate at $500. By the midway point of the decade, however, his fortunes had turned and he was forced to auction some of his business equipment to pay off debts. He moved in with his daughter and son-in-law, William M. T. Forrester, who had apprenticed with Smith and became a successful businessman and fraternal order leader.
After suffering from poor health during the last months of his life, Lomax B. Smith died of pericarditis on 8 September 1877. One of the white Richmond newspapers memorialized him as a respected Black citizen and even affectionately as "not only the barber but often the gossip, and always the friend." The number of mourners, both Black and white, attending Smith's funeral at the First African Baptist Church was immense, with hundreds unable to get inside. In appreciation of his fifty years of loyalty, members of the Richmond Light Infantry Blues served as pallbearers and led the funeral procession from the church to his burial place, which was almost certainly the Cedarwood Cemetery (later part of the Barton Heights cemeteries in Richmond) where he owned a plot. Decades after his death, Richmonders continued to recall that "Smith was proud that he was barber to the Marquis de Lafayette during his stay in Richmond."
Sources Consulted: United States Census Schedules, Richmond City, 1840, 1850 (age forty), 1860 (age forty), 1870 (age fifty-six), Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Richmond City Deed Book, 46:483–484 (with middle name Boswell); Richmond Whig and Public Advertiser, 17 Jan. 1840; Richmond Daily Dispatch, 10 Feb. 1852 (first and second quotations), 21 Nov. 1859 (third quotation), 18 July 1866, 22 May 1867, 26 Nov. 1867, 24 Nov. 1868, and 25 Nov. 1868; Alexandria Gazette, 23 July 1866; Shepherdstown Register, 14 Oct. 1871; Richmond Times, 5 May 1901 (fifth quotation); John A. Cutchins, A Famous Command: The Richmond Light Infantry Blues (1934), 172, 179; Smith's health documented in 10 May 1877 letter to Thomas Nelson Page, Richmond Light Infantry Blues Association Records, 1853–1922, Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond; Richmond City Chancery Court Will Book, 2:94–95; Death Register (with birthplace and age at death of 69 years, 4 months), Richmond City, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; obituaries, death notices, and funeral accounts in Richmond State, 8 Sept. 1877 (fourth quotation), Richmond Daily Dispatch, 10 Sept. 1877 (died "in the seventy-first year of his age"), 11 Sept. 1877, Fredericksburg News, 13 Sept. 1877, and Staunton Vindicator, 14 Sept. 1877.