Groundsite Image Gallery
Homesite of Mary and Charles Langston
Artist: Hughes, Langston
Height: 0.000"
Width: 0.000"
Homesite of Mary and Charles Langston, 1886 to 1915, 732 Alabama St.
Langston Hughes’s maternal grandparents owned the house that was once on this site. Hughes remembered his grandmother telling him “long, beautiful stories about people who wanted to make the Negroes free” (Big Sea) as he grew up here.
They moved from a farm near Lakeview when Charles Langston entered the grocery business. Charles is listed in the city directory at this address in 1886. After he died (1892), Mary continued to reside here, except for when she rented it out and boarded with the Reeds on New York St. and the times she lived with her daughter Carrie and Carrie’s husband, James N. Hughes, in Joplin or Mexico.
Hughes and his mother lived here intermittently throughout Hughes’s childhood. The 1902-03 city directory records both Carrie M. Hughes and Mary Langston at this residence, but minor children were not listed, so Hughes was also here. The 1905 census shows the boy Hughes, age 4, living here with his grandmother Mary Langston, age 69. In the 1907 city directory, James N. Hughes, Langston’s father, is listed at this residence, and his occupation is “stenographer.” And in 1915, Homer Clark, Langston’s stepfather, and Carrie (Langston) Clark are listed as living here.
Legal description of this property is lot 9 and the south half of lot 8, block 12 of the Lane Place subdivision. A duplex is now on this site.