Crawford, Frazer & Company of Atlanta and of Auburn
by Robert S. Davis
DGS 2022 Writing Contest Submission: Your family’s black sheep
The best part of genealogy is uncovering history. Almost from its beginning in 1847, Atlanta was the center of a powerful economic entity more than 150 miles across, including Lee and surrounding counties. The builders of this major world city, Black and White, had numerous ties to East Alabama, as in the murder of Samuel Landrum in 1858 that brought about the city’s first execution. The connection of Robert A. Crawford and Addison D. Frazer of Auburn to Atlanta is such an amazing tale.1
Crawford claimed Virginia in 1811 for his birth but even today no documentation clearly identifies him before he married Ann Elizabeth Lee, twenty-seven years his junior and daughter of wealthy farmer Nelson P. Lee of Newton County, in neighboring Butts County, Georgia in 1849.2 The couple soon moved to Auburn, Alabama where Robert owned twenty slaves; $2,000 worth of real estate; a part interest in the Auburn and Girard Plank Road; and a buggy and coach factory.3 His sixty disgruntled employees reportedly burned down the factory. Crawford’s rebuilt Phoenix factory went bankrupt, taken over by his largest creditor, planter-entrepreneur Matthew Turner of Auburn. Crawford’s wife, according to a family story, had died in childbirth in 1850.4
Robert A. Crawford was active in the Democratic Party and in the Knights of the Golden Circle, which would have gotten him connected with his local high society. He married wealthy widow Sarah Jane Sanford (nee Lyons) and then lost her fortune in building the Sitoa Merchant (flour) mill in Houston County, Georgia in 1858-1859. After her death, also reportedly in childbirth, he married wealthy widow Martha Caroline Bailey (nee Heronton) and invested in newspapers in Griffin and Atlanta. In 1860, he recruited mercenaries for an expedition to invade Mexico as part of a fantastical and fraudulent scheme of the secretive political Knights of the Golden Circle organization.5
Robert A. Crawford had an equally complicated, often falsified, and unsuccessful, career in the Civil War. The records became so confused that his widow would not be able to draw a pension for his service from the state of Georgia. He served as an officer alternately in the Georgia state army, the 1st Georgia Regulars Regiment, and in the state troops from 1860-1862. Crawford reported on and claimed to have been wounded in battle.6
By January 4, 1863, Crawford, with Addison D. Frazer and son Thomas Lafayette Frazer of Auburn, formed Crawford, Frazer & Company in Atlanta. The business initially sold mules but, within days, it offered for sale the enslaved and sometimes entire families but especially skilled workers. Several auction houses in Atlanta were in this business but this company opened the city’s first slave market in a structure built for that purpose in 1850 but until then it was not used to that end. An 1864 photograph of the building became one of the great icons of the Civil War.7
The Frazers initially provided the company’s enslaved people. Born and raised in 1809 in Lincoln County, Georgia, in the area known as “the dark corner” – a reference to its large number of African Americans – Addison Frazer moved in 1836 to what later became Bullock County, Alabama. Raids by bands of Creek Indians forced him to abandon his plantation. In 1849, he settled in Auburn as a small farmer.8 A planter by 1860, Frazer reportedly had in bondage one elderly couple, 28 males-females age thirty, and 42 girls age ten as his property. He had also, by then, become the president of the East Alabama Insurance Company and owner of a shoe factory. Frazer and his son Thomas, like Crawford, did business with the Confederate government as private contractors.9
Crawford, Frazer & Company had a hugely successful business judging by the advertising and stories published across the country. They moved to a larger building on Peachtree Street and began a satellite business in Montgomery, Alabama. The company seemingly sold everything but munitions, including furnished houses, livestock, pharmaceuticals, and shiploads of goods smuggled through the federal blockade of the Confederate ports. The proprietors even sold enslaved people in Virginia, what had before the war served as the great source for people in bondage by “Georgia traders,” as American dealers in human trafficking were generally known. Atlanta surpassed Richmond as the South great market for enslaved people.10
The partnership ended by April 1864 for reasons unknown, although at that time, the Frazers did publicly endorse Crawford’s “superior business qualifications, ample means, and known integrity.”11 Crawford continued the former business in Atlanta. The Frazers became partners with William E. Smith of Auburn, Alabama in a slave market above Montgomery Hall on Market Street in Montgomery, Alabama. They advertised as far as Atlanta and Savannah.12
After the war, Addison Frazer suffered severe financial duress and unsuccessfully filed for property lost to the federal military. He died in Auburn on April 23, 1873. Judge Thomas Lafayette Frazer (b. 1835) had a distinguished career in public service, including as a founding father of the city of Opelika, before a railroad car backed over and killed him on October 5, 1894.13
Robert A. Crawford became at least a tourist on the battlefields as Sherman’s army marched ever closer to Atlanta. He moved his businesses to Macon, Georgia. In the post-war years and after losing another wife to childbirth, he married her niece Lucy Anne Greene of Griffin. He became involved in questionable schemes involving mining, railroads, real estate, and state bonds in Atlanta, Cartersville, and New York. Occasionally, Crawford become the subject of political articles in the national press. He died on a business trip to Atlanta on April 12, 1892, leaving his last known wife and his several children destitute.14
If you have information on the characters of this saga, please contact Robert S. Davis, 68074 Main Street, Blountsville, AL 35031, or online genws@hiwaay.net.
NOTES
1 See “Hysteria and Literature: Atlanta’s First Execution and its Legendary Ties to Organized Crime,”Georgia Historical Quarterly 92 (Fall 2008): 321-39.
2 Lewis T. Bullock, “Col. Robert Ashton Crawford,” Personality File, Atlanta History Center, Atlanta; Robert A. Crawford, Case Files of Applications from Former Confederates for Presidential Pardons (“Amnesty Papers”), 1865-1867 (National Archives microfilm M1003), Record Group 94 Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1865-1867, National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA), Washington; Brent H. Holcomb, comp., Marriage and Death Notices from the Southern Christian Advocate 2 vols. (Easley, SC, 1979-1980), 1: 206. Crawford’s family has a story that he had an earlier divorce in Sumter County, Georgia. He is in the 1850 federal census of the part of Macon County that became Lee County in 1866 but he should not be confused with another Robert A. Crawford (born Georgia, ca. 1824) in the same census. Bullock, “Col. Robert Ashton Crawford”; Macon County, population schedules pp. 242a, 373b Seventh Census of the United States (1850), NARA.
3 Macon County, Alabama, slave owners schedule, Seventh Census of the United States (1850) (National Archives microfilm M432, roll 20), NARA; Acts of the Second Biennial Session of the General Assembly of Alabama (Montgomery, AL, 1850), 248-49. Crawford’s factory may have stood on Glenn, near Wright Street, or between College and Gay Streets in Auburn. His house was disassembled for materials for an expansion of the Boykin House which would later be moved twice and now sits, ironically, next to Addison Frazer’s Noble Hall on Shelton Mill Road in Auburn. Mrs. W. B. [Mary B.] Frazer, Early History of Auburn (Auburn, AL, 1920), 6; Mary Norman to author, September 24, 2022.
4 Frazer, Early History of Auburn, 6; R. A. Crawford to Matthew Turner, August 5, 1851, and same to John W. W. Drake et al, August 10, 1852, Macon County deed book H (1851-1852), 142, 636, LGM rolls 23-24, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery. Matthew Turner built the Halliday Cary Pick House, now part of Auburn University. He later had a very controversial divorce. Turner v. Turner, 44 Ala. 437 (1870), Alabama State Supreme Court Cases, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery: https://cite.case.law/ala/44/437/
5 Tad Evans, comp., Georgia Newspaper Clippings Harris County Extracts 1828-1888 (Savannah, 2005), 250, and Macon, Georgia Newspaper Abstracts (Weekly Telegraph), 14 vols. (Savannah, 2001-2010), 8: 11, 13, 36, 57, 63, 80; Spalding County, Georgia, p. 182, Eighth Census of the United States (1860) (National Archives microfilm M653, roll 122), NARA; Elizabeth Evans Kilbourne, comp., Columbus, Georgia Newspaper Clippings, 12 vols. (Savannah, 2004-2010), 10: 115; “Griffin Empire State,” Macon (Georgia) Telegraph, November 2, 1858, p. 2 c. 1; Gordon B. Smith, History of the Georgia Militia 1783-1861 4 vols. (Milledgeville, GA, 2001), 4: 325, 328-32. For more on the Knights of the Golden Circle, see David C. Keehn, Knights of the Golden Circle, Secret Empires, Southern Secession, Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2013)
6 Robert A. Crawford file, Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the State of Georgia (National Archives microfilm M266, rolls 120, 606), Record Group 109 War Department Collection of Confederate Records, NARA; Elizabeth Evans Kilbourne, comp., Columbus, Georgia Newspaper Clippings (Weekly Sun), 4 vols. (Savannah, 2012), 1: 196, 2: 39, 151, 227, 359.
7 Advertisements, Atlanta Daily Intelligencer, January 8, 1863, p. 3, c. 1 and January 25, 1863, p. 2 c. 5; advertisement, Southern Confederacy (Atlanta, GA), January 27, 1863, p. 1 c. 3; Bullock, “Col. Robert Ashton Crawford.”
8 Robert C. Horn, Taproots: Epitaphs in East-Central Alabama Cemeteries, 4 vols. (Dadeville, AL, 1982), 1: 15, 3: 42; “Lincoln County Yesterday,” McDuffie (Georgia) Progress, August 8, 1913, p. 24 c. 1; Brant & Fuller, Memorial History of Alabama, 2 vols. (Madison, WI, 1893), 2: 391.
9 Macon County, Alabama, slave owners schedule, Seventh Census of the United States (1850) (National Archives microfilm M432, roll 20); Alexander Nunn, Lee County and Her Forebears (Opelika, AL, 1984), 60-61, 64-67; credit reports, Macon County, Alabama 15 (1859-1874), pp. 43, 53, R. G. Dun & Company credit ledgers, Baker Library, Special Collections, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Robert A. Crawford and Addison Frazer files, Confederate Papers Relating to Citizens or Business Firms (National Archives microfilm M346, rolls 207, 323), Record Group 109 War Department Collection of Confederate Records, NARA. The Lincoln County, Georgia, from which the Frazers hailed also was home to Georgia’s most prominent Crawford family. Addison Frazer built the Frazer-Brown-Pearson Home (Noble Hall) in Auburn.
10 Advertisements, Southern Confederacy (Atlanta), March 5, 1863, p. 2 c. 6; advertisements, February 12, 1863, p. 2 c. 6, October 2, p. 1, c. 6, December 12, 1863, p. 2 c. 6; Addison Frazer to “The Peculiar Institution,” Daily Evansville (Indiana) Journal, July 1, 1864, p. 2 c. 3-4; “The Atlanta Markets,” Daily Evening Traveller (Boston, MA), March 21, 1863, p. 4 c. 2; advertisement, Macon (Georgia) Telegraph, February 7, 1865, p. 2 c. 5; James Michael Russell, Atlanta 1847-1890 (Baton Rouge, 1988), 72; Advertisements, Atlanta Daily Intelligencer, September 3, 1863, p. 3 c. 6, September 10, 1863, p. 3 c. 2, September 13, 1863, p. 3 cc. 1 and 5; Wendy Hamand Venet, A Changing Wind: Commerce and Conflict in Civil War Atlanta (New Haven, 2014), 97-98.
11 Advertisement, Memphis Daily Appeal (Atlanta), January 13, 1864, p. 2 c. 3.
12 Advertisements, Atlanta Daily Intelligencer, January 13, p. 5 c. 6, February 16, p. 5 c. 6, April 2, p. 3 c. 2, April 21, p. 2 c. 6, July 21, 1864, p. 2 c. 6; advertisements, Southern Confederacy (Atlanta), May 11, 1863, p. 3 c. 5, May 1, 1864, p. 2 c. 8, April 2, 1864, p. 3 c. 2,; Franklin M. Garrett, Atlanta and Environs 2 vols. (New York, 1954), 1: 586; advertisement, Memphis Daily Appeal (Atlanta), January 13, 1864, p. 2 c. 3; advertisement, Savannah (Georgia) Republican, April 15, 1864, p. 1 c. 6.
13 Memory Lee Aldridge Lester, comp., Old Southern Bible Records: Transcriptions of Births, Deaths, and Marriages from Family Bibles, Chiefly of the 18th and 19th Centuries (Baltimore, 1974), 131; Name and Subject Index to Records used in the Settlement of Claims, 1861-1909, Entry 366, Record Group 56 Records of the Treasury, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD; “U. S. Marshal’s Sale,” Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser, July 2, 1867, p. 1, c. 3; “Crushed by a Car,” Atlanta (Georgia) Constitution, October 6, 1894, p. 2, c. 3.
14 “An Old Soldier Was Laid to Rest Yesterday,” Atlanta (Georgia) Constitution, May 14, 1892, p. 4 c. 3; Fulton County, ED 88, sheet 135B, Tenth Census of the United States (1880) (National Archives microfilm T9, roll 147), and Fulton County, ED 49, p. 5, Twelfth Census of the United States (1900) (National Archives microfilm MT623, roll 198), NARA.
©2022 Robert S. Davis
Published by Dallas Genealogical Society with the author’s permission
