Williard Home
Beaumont’s David Willard says when the home in which he and wife Kim now live was under construction in 1930, “as family lore has it, people would pack a picnic lunch, sit across the street and just watch it being built.”
Costly brick homes, let alone one two stories high, were rare for the time, but even more so for a Black man born Aug. 11, 1867, on the Calder Plantation, where parents Riley and Margaret Willard were slaves.
David Willard says the onlookers were drawn to what the home symbolized for the Black community. “It was sort of a communal thing. People took pride that a Black family had done this.”
The Willard home represented the possibilities and future for Black citizenry.
Elmo Willard, like many of them, had been born to slaves. His father died when he was 8, after which he became the head of the household, working several jobs to support the family, including jockeying race horses. He went on to work at the Long & Company Shingle Mill, and studied barbering after work.
Elmo Willard I eventually became a barber and opened his own shop.
“That was a good profession back in the day,” David Willard notes. “But he was also very enterprising,” he adds, and alongside family who’d also prospered post-slavery, the extended family numbering near 30, they managed to buy multiple tracts of land in Beaumont.
“He and his cousins became well known in Beaumont,” David Willard says. One of them, P. H. Willard, brought the Atlanta Life Insurance Company to the city — the only company almost nationally that offered insurance to Black people. P. H. Willard built a grand home, as well, and was known for his expert orchid gardens. “People would come f rom all over to buy his orchids,” David Willard says.
The Willard family owned land on Irving Street in the South end, on Neches and Forsythe sreets downtown, and Gladys Street in north central Beaumont, where David’s home was built, along with others.
All became hubs of Black life at the time.
Several Black churches, theaters, nightclubs, markets and restaurants filled the communities.
Since his early beginnings as a child worker, to barbering, and his growing reputation as a successful businessman and property owner, Willard earned respect among people of both races, David Willard says.
“And his wife was equally loved and respected,” he says. Sarah Adams Willard was the grand-daughter of Elisha Adams, a former slave who established the city’s first school for Black children — the Adams School on Cedar Street. The long-vacant building was demolished in 2019.
His accomplishments extended beyond business and further solidified his reputation throughout the community. “He was very civic-minded,” David Willard says.
He and other prospering Black families, like the Sprott family, the Tafts and others,
also realized the role they could play not just in their own advancement, but in advancing their race at large.
“They were what were known as ‘race men,’” Willard explains. “They were of a collective mind - we’re all in this together - and they would support one another.” It was a true “it takes a village” mentality of what it took to come up f rom and then help bring others up from slavery.
Elmo Willard had become so highly regarded that he served on juries, “which was unheard of for a Black man at that time,” David Willard says.
When he approached the YMBL, offering to “put up the money to make sure the fair had an Af rican-American exhibit in the exhibition hall so that Af ricanAmericans had something there for them on the fair’s ‘Negro Days,’ he got them to agree to that.”
“His integrity really aided him with both races,” Willard says.
When race riots broke out in Beaumont in 1943, Willard says, “the Texas Rangers came in to quash the riots, and before they got here they asked city leaders for people respected in both communities to help act as respective liaisons and provide them a site at which to set up headquarters. Everyone said, ‘Go to Elmo Willard,’ and that’s where they went.”
Rangers slept in the house and on the property surrounding it as they helped bring order to the city.
Elmo Willard ensured that the legacy of prosperity and upward mobility would continue with his five children: Elmo Jr., Vietta, Margaurite, James and Howard.
All five attended college at Howard University. Only Howard, who died of a brain aneurysm the summer after his f reshman year, failed to matriculate.
“This is how forward-thinking he was,” David Willard says, “that he didn’t just send his sons, but his daughters to college, as well.”
Elmo Willard Jr., later opened the first Black-owned mortuary in Beaumont, complete with an ambulance service, and sent his son Elmo Willard III, to Fisk University in Chicago, where he met his wife, Patricia.
As a law student at Howard University, he worked with Thurgood Marshall on the landmark civil rights case Brown vs. Board of Education.
The experience served him well when he returned to Beaumont, joining attorney Theodore R. Johns’ law firm in 1954. The two civil rights lawyers “desegregated all that needed to be in Beaumont — schools, parks, the libraries, restaurants,” David Willard recalls.
He remembers that his father “experienced a lot of blowback” but that the integration effort ultimately prevailed. It likely paved the way for David to attend All Saints Episcopal School as its first Black student.
He later went on to college, as well, and worked as a teacher at prestigious private institutions in Virginia and Washington, D.C., then enrolled in Harvard University’s School of Education, where he received two master’s degrees and his Ph.D.
Twelve years ago, while finishing his dissertation, Willard and his wife, Kim, returned to Beaumont.
“My mother was getting older, and she was by herself, so it was time to come home,” Willard says.
His dissertation completed, Willard returned to the classroom, and is now Dean of Students and an English teacher at his alma mater, All Saints Episcopal.
Eight years ago, he and Kim decided to move into the family’s original home, which had been a rental property for nearly 20 years after his father died. Willard III, used the home as his law office after his aunt Margaurite Willard’s passing.
“I’m living in the place where all my family was raised and some born, and in the neighborhood that was integral to my family and the Black community,” Willard says. “To come back and be able to continue that legacy is a really good feeling.”
Part of that legacy includes running for elected office.
Willard III was the first Black man to run for an elected office, on the Board of Commissioners. He lost in a runoff, and also failed to win a seat on city council.
“My dad set the course. He was the first to run, and I’m the first Willard to win,” says Willard, who was recently elected to the Port of Beaumont Board of Commissioners.
“In many ways it’s all come full circle,” Willard says, adding, “I can continue the legacy I was lucky enough to be born under. Not many people get the opportunity to walk in the shoes you grew up in as a kid.”
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“I’m living in the place where all my family was raised and some born, and in the neighborhood that was integral to my family and the Black community,” Willard says. “To come back and be able to continue that legacy is a really good feeling.”