Alexander Epps (7 December 1860–25 December 1906), merchant, was born in Westmoreland County and was the son of Mary Epps (later Golding) and an unknown father. Contemporaries often spelled his surname Eppes. Sources do not indicate whether he was born free or enslaved or provide any details about his early life and education or indicate when or how he arrived in the Danville area sometime after the Civil War. About 1879 Epps went to work for or formed a business partnership with Mayer H. Langfeld, who had grown up in a Jewish mercantile family in Philadelphia. In 1883 Epps received a license to sell liquor at the store he ran in Jacksonville, an African American community adjacent to Danville that later became known as Almagro. He probably sold alcohol without a license before then. When the Pittsylvania County Court appointed him a registrar on 1 October 1883 the Danville Corporation Court charged him with selling liquor without a license, and the county revoked his appointment three days later. On 26 November 1884 Epps married Sallie Dodson. They had seven children, of whom three sons and one daughter survived him.
Epps's business operations spanned the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth when the political power of African Americans was being curtailed. In 1890 a newspaper article on Danville's African American community described Epps's store, carrying items such as groceries, boots, and wine, as "a surprise to all beholders." Three years later Epps owned a grocery store and a fuel store, selling coal and wood. By 1898 his enterprises also included a dry-goods department and a saloon. His growing economic success enabled him to acquire property in the Danville area during the 1880s. Epps and Langfeld purchased a Jacksonville lot, along a railroad line and bordering the Danville city limits, in 1891 for $2,000, half with cash and half with two promissory notes. After Langfeld died the following year, Epps purchased his share of the property for $1,500. He acquired additional real estate, including adjacent parcels of 50 and 116 acres in 1894 and 1896. When a trustee auctioned off the West End Land Company's properties to pay its debts, Epps purchased seven neighborhood properties for $143.
Epps was an active member of the local and state chapters of the Independent Order of Good Samaritans and Daughters of Samaria. He was chair of the state convention's credentials committee in 1898 and state treasurer in 1902. When the state order chartered the Benevolent Endowment Association in 1901 to manage its fund for paying death benefits, Epps served as its treasurer. He was also a member of the Knights of Pythias, another benevolent association. So prominent a place did Epps and his businesses occupy in Almagro that more than twenty years after his death people still sometimes referred to one of the buildings he had owned as the Alexander Epps store, and still later somebody incorrectly stated that when Epps died he was worth $75,000.
Epps won election as a justice of the peace for his magisterial district on 27 May 1897, along with another African American who was elected constable. Epps took office on 1 July and won reelection at least twice, serving until 1905. He was one of the very few African Americans to win election to public office in Virginia during the early years of the twentieth century. Somewhat ironically, the former seller of alcohol was one of the two justices who presided over a trial in April 1905 in which a man was accused of assaulting two agents of the Anti-Saloon League.
In September 1906 Epps began suffering from what became a fatal illness, and he wrote his will in October. Alexander Epps died at his home in Almagro on 25 December 1906 and he was buried in a nearby cemetery. His funeral was notable for its integrated attendance. Epps's widow declined to serve as executrix of his estate, so the court appointed his eldest son administrator and required him to post a bond of $1,500, which according to a long-established legal custom under such circumstances was about twice the estimated value of the estate. That indicates that Epps's estate may have been worth about $750, not the $75,000 that a later report indicated.
Sources Consulted:
Brief biography with date and place of birth in Richmond Planet, April 23, 1898; Mecklenburg County Marriage Licenses (with variant spelling Eppes); property holdings documented in Pittsylvania County Deed Books 84, 88, 91, 98, 100, 101, 103, 107, 109, 110, 112; Richmond Planet, December 6, 1890 (quotation); Luther Porter Jackson, Negro Office-Holders in Virginia, 1865–1895 (1945), 65 (with report of estate valued at $75,000), 67 (portrait); Pittsylvania County Circuit Court Will Book 4 (1890–1907): 452–453; obituary with date of death and account of funeral in Danville Register, December 26, 28, 1906.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Matthew S. Gottlieb.
How to cite this page:
Matthew S. Gottlieb,"Alexander Epps (1860–1906)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Epps_Alexander, accessed [today's date]).
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