Groundsite Image Gallery
820 Massachusetts St.
Artist: Hughes, Langston
Height: 0.000"
Width: 0.000"
820 Massachusetts St., site of the Charles Langston and Richard Burns grocery store, 1888-92 (1866)
The awning of 820 Massachusetts now reads “Black-Eyed Susan’s.” The city directory listed this business as a grocery, owned by Burns and Co., with Langston Hughes’s grandfather as a business associate.
According to the Lawrence Weekly Record obituary of 1892, Charles Langston, grandfather of Langston Hughes, moved into Lawrence in 1886 from a farm in nearby Lakeview so he could participate more fully in community life. He was, briefly, associate editor of The Historic Times, a local African American newspaper. He served as president of Lawrence’s Colored Benevolent Society, Grand Master of the Masonic Fraternity (colored) of Kansas, and the “Counselor of the Knights of the Wise Men of the World.” Langston continued to farm (he owned 26 acres at Lakeview in the 1893-94 city directory) as well as maintain his part of the grocery business until his death in 1892, at the age of 75.
In 1893-94, Nathaniel Turner Langston, Charles and Mary’s son, was listed in the city directory as a grocer with Burns and Co.