Who was Raleigh Brown Ijams (1858-1907)?

Raleigh, or “R.B.”, was born into a wealthy family in modern day West Virginia, raised in Baltimore and later lived in Manhattan. He engaged in a variety of business ventures. He never married, nor had any children, and died at a relatively young age of 48. Fortunately, through his appreciation of a young Helen Keller, we learn much more about Raleigh.

Beginnings

Raleigh was born as the fifth child in a large family of 5 boys and 4 girls. His father, James Ijams, was a very successful businessman who served as a procurement officer for the Confederate Army in the Civil War. His mother, Dorcas Susan Mitchel Tabb, came from a well-established Berkeley County family (then in Virginia, now in West Virginia after 1863).

Father - James Ijams

From the 1860 Census,¹ we can see James is a hotel keeper with a personal estate valued at $2,000. He is living with his wife, six children, and his mother-in-law, Arabella Tabb. Also living in the hotel were eleven guests with a variety of occupations and some with families.

Enslaved People in the Household

The 1860 federal slave schedule² documents that James enslaved seven people. Names were not recorded — standard practice on the schedule — only age, sex, color, and whether the enslaved person had escaped within the preceding year. The Ancestry digitization is the most legible.³

Five of the seven escaped in the preceding year. That is an unusually high proportion, and it reflects geography. The Ijams household sat in Jefferson County — then in Virginia, today the easternmost county of West Virginia — adjacent to the free state of Pennsylvania, with Harpers Ferry just down the road. By 1859 the routes through South Mountain into Pennsylvania were a well-established Underground Railroad corridor; John Brown’s raid on the Harpers Ferry arsenal took place that October. The escapes recorded in this specific household in 1859-60 fit squarely into that regional pattern.

Moving to Baltimore

By 1870 the family had relocated to Baltimore.⁴ James, age 51, worked as a “Clerk in Office” with personal estate of $200 — a dramatic decline from his pre-war hotel-keeping wealth. Dorcas is recorded as “Keeping House,” with seven of their children at home: Della (19), John (17), “Rolla” (11), Elizabeth (10), Marion (9), Joseph (6), and Edgar (5). The 11-year-old “Rolla” is almost certainly Raleigh — the age is within the year of error typical for an 1870 census entry, and no other child in the family fits the description. The variant likely represents a phonetic rendering by the enumerator or a transcription quirk in the cursive original.

Adulthood

By 1878 Raleigh was a 20-year-old clerk in Baltimore, working at F.H. Davidson & Co. — the same firm that employed his eldest brother Plummer Montgomery (28). Both brothers lived together at 166 N. Arlington Avenue. Wood’s Baltimore Directory for 1878 lists them on consecutive lines:⁵

By 1880 James had died — seven years earlier, on 30 June 1873 in Baltimore — and the brothers’ occupations had shifted. The census that year shows the widowed Dorcas (age 49) running the Baltimore household with her grown children, including Plummer (29, now “Clerk in Hardware”) and Raleigh himself, age 22, working as a “Clerk in Bakery House.”⁶

By 1900 Raleigh had moved to Manhattan. He is listed as a boarder, age 41, single, born September 1859 in West Virginia, occupation “Salesman.”⁷

Later Years

By 1905 Raleigh was writing from Saranac Lake, New York — and that placement is no coincidence. Saranac Lake was the home of the Trudeau Sanatorium, founded by Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau in 1885 and the first tuberculosis sanatorium in the United States. The village had become the country’s premier destination for “cure cottages” — small private boarding houses where TB patients received the rest, fresh air, and supervised diet that constituted state-of-the-art treatment in the pre-antibiotic era. Raleigh almost certainly wrote his letter to The Century from a sickbed in one of those cottages. Two years later, tuberculosis would kill him at age 48.

We have the good fortune to have his short letter from that period.⁸

With the help of ChatGPT, we have an easy to read transcription.

P.O. Box 331.
Saranac Lake. N.Y.
Jan. 27. 1905.

Century Co.
Union Square. N.Y.

Dear Sirs.

Referring to the highly interesting prose-poem in the January issue of your magazine by Helen Keller.⁹ Will you kindly advise me of the name of the literature obtainable giving an account of the career of this remarkable woman. I am deeply interested & hope you will be able to give me the names of such books telling of her history. I should also like to find a copy of her essay on optimism referred to by R.W.G.¹⁰

I enclose stamped envelope & thank you in advance for your information.

Very truly yours,
R.B. Ijams.
per E.J.

Death

For a man of some wealth and family prominence, we have few artifacts from his death. Raleigh was in Goldsboro, North Carolina when he died, but it is unclear why he was there. He had no family connections to the area, and no obituary appeared in the local papers. His death certificate was filled out by his brother John Tabb Ijams, who listed Raleigh’s occupation as “Banker” and his residence at the time of death as the Hotel Kennon in Goldsboro. The cause of death was tuberculosis — the disease he had been treating in Saranac Lake. Curiously, the certificate was completed in the District of Columbia, not in North Carolina. Perhaps John was notified of the death and the only way to arrange transport of the body was to complete the certificate there in D.C.

A search of the local Goldsboro newspapers reveals no death notification. Newspapers in New York City and Baltimore did publish brief death notices, but no full obituaries. His body was quickly shipped to Baltimore for burial in the family plot.

The notice in The Baltimore Sun on the morning of his funeral was characteristically terse:¹¹

IJAMS — On April 8, 1907, at Goldsboro, N. C., RALEIGH BROWN IJAMS, son of the late James and Dorcas Tabb Ijams.
Funeral services at the Church of the Ascension this Wednesday, April 10, at 10.30 A. M.