Since 1916, our store at 233 12th St. SE in Washington under various names has become a landmark and meeting place in the Lincoln Park neighborhood.
Christine Campbell, 59, recalls that even though the business changed hands, it was always Mott’s Market. “My grandmother would drop us off at the corner store and pick up what we needed for breakfast and dinner,” Campbell said. “My uncles used to talk about playing numbers in the corner. Mott’s served as a place for information sharing.”
But in the spring of 2022, the Choi family, who had owned the building, including the store, for 40 years, put it up for sale, raising fears that it would be demolished or replaced with a building that doesn’t fit with the neighborhood. .
Campbell began talking to neighbors about ways to stop the inevitable. The answer was simple. Buy a building.
That’s what Campbell’s family has done for generations. The Campbell family began in Charlotte Hall, Maryland, where she and Ms. Campbell lived with Ms. Campbell’s great-grandfather, Wesley Prater, who worked as a sharecropper and owned the land he managed under her will. Until 2020, we have built a real estate legacy. As owners of the Keystone Inn, the Campbell brothers are the first black hospitality executives at the historic home of the Battle of Gettysburg and President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
This is a legacy that defies hardship. Black people face discrimination when purchasing homes, obtaining loans, and getting home appraisals. According to the Brookings Institution, Black mortgage applicants are 2.9% more likely to have their applications denied, and when they do own a home, they end up paying 10% to 13% more in taxes than white homeowners due to appraisals. He says he will face it.
“Owning real estate is part of our history and gives us a sense of security, family and home,” Campbell said.
Still, buying Mott’s Market turned out to be more difficult than Campbell and her neighbors had expected. They formed a coalition called Save Mott’s Market and offered $1 million, but lost out to a buyer who paid $1.25 million all in cash.
In the aftermath, the Choi family released the following statement. Let them know that it has been an honor to serve the community for nearly 40 years, and that we will always cherish those memories. ”
“Great Grandpop” Leroy and Flossie
For Campbell, it was shocking. Campbell’s family, including her grandfather, whom she calls her “great grandpa,” had an interest in real estate before moving to the area.
“My great-grandfather wrote a will that stated that as long as his children were alive, his family should continue to own property in Maryland so that they would always have a home to return to. We can,” Campbell said. “During that time, there was a kind of migration from southern Maryland to Washington, D.C. Families settled by word of mouth and tended to move together to certain areas of the city. We settled in this area of Washington, D.C.”
Walter Street in Lincoln Park was primarily designated for black residents by racially restrictive code of conduct. This is a private contract designed to confine Washington, D.C.’s growing black population to specific areas of the city, according to research by Prologue DC LLC, a woman-run company that created a map of Lincoln Park. ing. The history of racism in cities.
In 1927, Ms. Campbell’s grandparents, Flossie Campbell, a hairdresser, and Leroy Campbell, a postal worker at a time when mail delivery was carried out by bicycle, were named “Reliable Colored People” in the Washington Herald. I saw an ad that said, “Race Buyer, I’ll buy it for $100 cash.” It’s a beautiful house,” said Campbell’s father, Prater Campbell, 95.
The Campbells settled in a two-story brick house on Walter Street, just a mile from the U.S. Capitol and Supreme Court. This house was built in 1912 to the design of her 20 year old architect AE Landvogt.
The couple paid $4,000 for the house.
Prater Campbell was born in this house. He recalled the racism in his neighborhood. “Despite the conditions, we were very happy. The neighborhood was friendly and had a lot of character. The kids made a baseball team. Most of my friends were doing very well in life, We stayed in touch over the years,” he said in a phone interview. “I’m one of the last ones left.”
His parents then bought a house on Kentucky Avenue Southeast, two blocks from Walter Street, in 1952, but left the house on Walter Street to rent to relatives and friends. Over the years, the couple owned his four homes in Washington, DC. Mr. Campbell’s Uncle Griffin ran a general store in the neighborhood, but in 1952 he moved next door on Kentucky Avenue Southeast.
Mr. Campbell left his childhood neighborhood when he went to college. He wanted to attend the University of Maryland, which did not accept black students. Instead, he graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1952 with a degree in social agriculture and married mathematician Joan Cross three years later. Mr. Campbell worked as a soil scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and rose to director of the Conservation Planning Division and member of the Senior Administrative Service, becoming one of the first Black members to reach this rank within the USDA.
Mr. Campbell’s work moved the family across the country, and Christine Campbell was born in Fargo, North Dakota, but the family never sold their Walter Street home and Mr. Prater and Joan lived together in 1984. Back in 2012, I bought a house from Mr. Leroy and Mr. Flossie.
Prater and Joan renovated the house with the help of their son, Stephen, who graduated from Carnegie Mellon University as an architect. It was Stephen’s first official assignment.
“My own original black family’s pride and homeownership legacy continues in this unique historic section of Washington, D.C.,” said Stephen Campbell, 67.
Joan passed away in February 2000. In 2007, Prater Campbell remarried and moved with his new wife, Faye, to Laurel, Maryland, where Christine purchased a house on Walter Street. Stephen bought a house on Kentucky Avenue.
‘well done’
Their family was already close-knit, but during the 2020 pandemic, brothers Christine, Stephen, and Patrick realized they needed one large home to comfortably accommodate their extended family.
They also wanted a return on their investment, so they came up with the idea of buying a bed and breakfast, which had been Campbell’s long-held ambition.
Christine and her brother Patrick, 57, took a course in B&B management and hired an inn broker and consultant to help them find an inn. They buy one that is within two hours of their respective residences, in a town that attracts guests, large enough for a family vacation, and on or near a subway stop. We have set standards such as: “That’s what we felt when we walked into the Keystone Inn: This is the hotel. Despite the age of the building, the beautiful woodwork, and the fact that it’s five blocks from the center of town, The location, away from the hustle and bustle, was appealing to my brother and I,” Campbell said.
“We’ve had Thanksgiving at this inn the past three times,” said Campbell, adding that the total number of relatives in attendance was about 40. She says, “We buy fresh turkey from the local butcher, watch parades and soccer, and play games. It’s fun and makes me happy.”
Although hard data is impossible to obtain, it is estimated that perhaps 1% of owners of small establishments such as inns and guesthouses in the United States are black.
The Gettysburg home was built in 1913 and is located on a lot of 6,000 sqft. The Campbells bought the house for $745,000 and then invested an additional $400,000 in renovations, including removing and expanding the kitchen and installing an eight-burner stove.
One of the renovations was a ramp. “Our mother was in a wheelchair most of her life, and we all have memories of getting her through the back door, through the freight elevator, or lifting her and her chair up the stairwell,” Campbell said. Told. “It was important to us that everyone could come in through the front door without feeling trapped. One day during the renovation, as Patrick was worrying about the cost of upgrades, including a ramp, I I said quietly, “I dedicate the ramp to my mom.”
After pausing for a moment, Patrick said, “Well played, sister, well played.”
The next step is actually running the inn and attracting guests. Their marketing plan targets family vacations, college reunions, and girls’ weekends.
Because Gettysburg is near several stations along the subway, they named one of the rooms in their house after Basil Biggs, a free black farmer and veterinarian in Gettysburg during the Civil War. He was instrumental in reburying the bodies of soldiers. He was killed at Gettysburg. In 1870, he used his wagon to drive black voters to the polls after learning that white voters drove to the polls.
“Grade F”
The Campbell family, who own yet another property, represents generational wealth. Ms. Campbell’s home, purchased by her grandparents in 1927, is worth $1 million, but her family would have amassed more wealth if her neighborhood had long been white.
Andre Perry, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and his co-authors studied 113 metropolitan areas and found that housing in black neighborhoods costs about half as much as housing in neighborhoods without black residents. discovered.
A detailed Federal Housing Administration map published in 1937 shows that 52 percent of Walter Street was occupied by owners and 63 percent occupied by blacks and other people of color. Another map produced by the agency the same year assigned a score to each section of the city. Almost all of Northeast and Southeast Washington, D.C., where most of the city’s black population lives, was given a “Grade F,” defined as “rapidly declining to a highly undesirable area.”
But researchers from the Works Progress Administration, who spread out across the city to collect data for the detailed 1937 map, found that no homes on Walter Street needed major repairs. , recorded that not a single house was found to be uninhabitable, suggesting that this contradicts the blanket statement made by the Housing Authority.
Campbell’s Lincoln Park homes rose in value as more white residents moved in. By 2012, their neighborhood ZIP code was on the list of 50 ZIP codes with the largest percentage of white population in the United States.
For Christine Campbell, it was important to come together with all of her neighbors, including white residents, to save the Motts home. When Motts first went up for sale, her inn was operating at full capacity and she volunteered her time to become a partner in this effort. Residents received some relief after the store was put back up for sale to a cash buyer.
The group formed a limited liability company and received more than $450,000 in investment capital, enough to cover a 25% down payment and initial operating costs. Mott’s Market purchased the property in October 2022 for $1.3 million.
It currently has nearly 60 investors and aims to have 400 former and current residents buy “bricks” to benefit the store.