Landlady's Manuscript Account Book.
Manuscript Account Book
Kept By A 19th Century Female Landlord
for Lower East Side Properties
[Finance]. [Hyams, Mrs. Elizabeth. Landlady’s Manuscript Account Book. New York City, unpublished, circa 1808-1832.]
Horizontal 8vo.; approximately 67 leaves or “pages” with autograph entries in three hands; entries on nearly every page, averaging three to a page; each page interleaved with blotter paper; pages sewn into brown leather; few pages loosely inserted or with partially printed and/or handwritten pages affixed to a blotter page; some wax remnants dribbled onto inner rear cover of boards. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
An unpublished manuscript account book recording monies paid and received for the years 1808 to 1832 by Mrs. Elizabeth Hyams, a New York City landlord and businesswoman. The entries are nearly all autograph and are written in three alternating hands, one of which has been identified as that of Mrs. Hyams’s daughter. The entries are, ostensibly, receipts for funds received by or paid by Mrs. Hyams from 1808-1832. (The entries that are in partially printed form are receipts, with names and values filled in.) In addition to providing us with financial information about Mrs. Hyams’s dealings, the entries give the modern reader a detailed understanding of each transaction.
The types of services for which Mrs. Hyams rendered payment are almost exclusively property-related: the receipts are primarily from men who did railing work, window repair, masonry, painting, chair caning, carpentry, construction work, plastering, grounds work, and gardening. The payments are primarily for rent from tenants, which seem to have been concentrated in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Again, most of her renters are men, although there is one receipt from an Eliza Harper who apparently boarded at one of Mrs. Hyams’s properties on Delancey Street.
Some of the more vivid entries include: $25 for the paving of Magazine Street (1808); $10 for window cornices (1812); $46 for ground rent of lot on Magazine Street (1813); $10 for a well and pump in Delancey Street, signed by Morris De Camp, Collector (1816); 1 pound for 6 months “pew rent” (1823); $9 ground rent on Bowery lot (1824); and $5 in full for property at auction, signed James Bleecker (1826).
In addition to giving us facts and figures, the account book illuminates the role of women in the business world and the general atmosphere of that world in the early 19th century. Interestingly, Mrs. Hyams accepted payments in both dollars and pounds, shedding light on the value of US currency during these years. And these records of dealings almost always with men suggest her uncommon standing as a businesswoman in the male-dominated world of property ownership and maintenance. The presence of three hands in the book—hers, her daughter’s, and one other—suggest something about the size of her business.
That she was allowed to operate a property-driven business at all leads us to believe that she was most likely a widow: before New York State’s passage of the Married Woman’s Property Act in 1848, the New York State law entitled the husband legal rights to all his wife’s property and possessions. At the time that Mrs. Hyams was making entries into her account book, there was only one exception to this rule: the English common law adapted by America on dowries and dower rights entitled widows to at least one third of their husband’s estates, making them the only class of women with the ability to engage in an independent financial or business transaction.
Firsthand accounts of women in 19th-century business are uncommon; those that reflect women as property owners conducting their trade in New York City are virtually unprocurable. This rare survival is rich with research potential.
(#5318)
Print Inquire