Photo by Jay Paul
WHAT: A Queen Anne-style residence with a central tower and pylon front porch supports
WHERE: 3025 Q. St.
WHY IT MATTERS: The city’s second licensed African-American contractor, Madison J. Bailey, designed and built this house for his family. It became the home and office for his daughter, Ethel, who went on to design significant structures, several of them within sight of the house.
Ethel Bailey Furman (1893-1976) went to work with her builder father and learned how to utilize raw materials to shape the world. She tagged along to job sites, where she picked up the language of the trades and grew into drafting some of Madison Bailey’s commissions.
She attended Armstrong High School until the family moved to suburban Philadelphia, where she graduated from Germantown High in 1910. Two years later, she married William H. Carter, and they had a daughter, Thelma Carter Henderson, and a son, Madison, but the couple divorced in 1918. She later married Joseph D. Furman, a Pullman porter, and they named their son J. Livingston. During this period, she parlayed previous on-the-job training into architecture apprenticeship in New York City. Furman brought her family back to Richmond in 1921 and started designing houses built in partnership with her father.
Furman was the only woman to attend the Hampton Institute's Negro Contractors' Conference in 1928. (Photo via Ethel Bailey Furman, Papers and architectural drawings, 1928-2003, Accession 41145. Courtesy Personal Papers Collection, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Va.)
Being both a woman and black, she had to work around the era’s prevalent discrimination, and getting her houses constructed meant occasional subterfuge. Furman submitted her plans to regional planning and approval boards under cover of male contractors, and often didn’t sign her work. She was the only woman to attend the Hampton Institute’s annual Negro Contractors’ Conference in 1928.
“Through her experience and knowledge of the building trades,” wrote Vincent Brooks in 2004 as archivist and historian for the Library of Virginia, “[Furman] sought to provide clients with affordable, attractive homes built from quality materials.”
She did all this as a mother of three and while working other jobs to bolster the family’s finances. Furman’s relatives and close friends referred to her as “Peachie” or “Mrs. P.” She was active in her church and participated in the March of Dimes, the Heart Fund and voter registration drives.
Furman continued her training with coursework in architectural drafting at the Chicago Technical College from 1944-1946. She designed an estimated 200 residences and churches in Central Virginia, though few examples of her domestic architecture remain. Her vision realized Fair Oak Baptist Church (Richmond), St. James Baptist Church (Goochland County) and Mount Nebo Baptist Church (New Kent County). She also designed the baptistery addition to Cedar Street Memorial Baptist (2301 Cedar St.) and the St. James Holiness Church (16 E. 28th St.). Two of her designs were donated to the Lott Carey Missionary League and erected in Liberia in Africa.
Furman also designed the house of Robert Wilder at nearby 28th and P Streets, the boyhood home of future Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder. That residence is no longer.
Furman’s 1961 International Style design for the educational wing of Richmond’s Fourth Baptist Church (1887) is recognized on the National Register of Historic Places.
She received the Walter Manning Citizenship Award in 1954, and the Richmond Afro-American newspaper recognized Furman for her extensive civic work in 1958. A Church Hill park, at 818 N. 28th St., received a 1985 dedication in her name.
The Library of Virginia holds the remaining papers associated with Furman’s practice. Unfortunately, in her declining later years and during a move from the Q Street house, the bulk of her early plans, client correspondence and business materials was lost.
