Looking for the Dunbar House

Since this is Black History Month I am going to do some things on the black community here in Dayton. Let's start with the most famous black man from old Dayton, the poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

The Dunbar House is a state historic site (which is in itself historic as it was one of the first sites honoring a black person), and a contributing structure to the national historic site.

Dunbar only lived there a short time before he died of TB. His mother, Matilda, lived there until the 1930s, when she passed on.

Dunbar’s life began on the other side of the city, on the east side. Dunbar was born and spend his childhood in the old Haymarket area, across Wayne from the Oregon. He was born in 1871, but the city directories don’t start listing Matilda at 311 Howard Street until 1874. Apparently Matilda was living with her sister and brother-in-law at first, which is why they are not in the directory.

Here is the location on an 1880s Sanborn map

But what did this house look like?

Enlarging the Sanborn, we see it was a double, with the Dunbar’s in the northern half. The house has a 2 story front, 1 1/2 story addition, and a 1 story back. So, based on the heights and the proportions, here is what I suspect the house might have looked like (though the rear roof lines are really guesswork)


Since this was a fairly old neighborhood (platted before much of the Oregon) and this part was built on by 1869, I suspect it might have looked like some of these old Oregon houses


Or, as an alternative, other types of doubles, one with a different roof line.

But where was it? The Haymarket was torn down via urban renewal, and Wayne went through changes too. Fortunately one structure on Wayne that survives today, and is on the 1880s Sanborn, is the Dietz Block. We can use this building as a reference point to see where the Dunbar house was, a block way.

Knowing that the city block between Wayne and Howard had an alley, one can reconstruct the outline of the Howard side of the block, and then projecting from the Dietz Block, one can roughly locate the site of the Dunbar house, where it would have stood on Howard, as shown on this aerial.
…and here is the rough location. If I had a 100’ tape measure and some chalk I could probably chalk out the outline on the parking lot, just by eyeballing the Dietz Block corner through that little gangway, and scaling-off the house dimensions from the Sanborn.
This would be a good spot for a historical marker, as it is readily accessible and it is, after all, were Dunbar was born.


Paul Lawrence Dunbar lived most of his life with his mother, so one can follow him by following her, as she moved around the city. One can discover were he was living when he published various worker, went to high school, etc. I will be doing this in a later thread, locating the Dunbar home sites (and they are just sites by now), and by that, giving a tour of the world of black folk in late 19th century Dayton.