2709 Two Notch Road
By 1896, some two to three hundred middle-class African Americans had formed a small suburb called “Kendalltown,” located northeast of the city in the modern day Barhamville Road area. The neighborhood initially consisted of about fifty four-room houses built on one-acre lots, but the name “Kendalltown” came to apply broadly to the African American residential area roughly bound by Two Notch Road on the east, the Southern Railroad on the west, Belt Line Drive on the north, and Elmwood Avenue on the south. Through the early twentieth century, Kendalltown was also home to many small farms which kept cows, goats, hogs, and poultry. The neighborhood’s namesake was the colorful Dr. Francis D. Kendall, from whom the initial land tract was purchased for development.
Dr. Kendall was a local Columbia physician, who for many years operated a large farm on the site of the Old Barhamville Academy. Kendall raised, among other livestock, an enormous and varied flock of fowl—ducks, geese, swans, chickens, and water fowl—that numbered over five hundred and won prizes at the State Fair. Dr. and Mrs. Kendall were a cosmopolitan pair who posted notices of their far flung travels in The State, and hosted large, elaborate social events on their Barhamville Road property. Kendall also distinguished himself in the local crime blotter, caught selling illegal narcotics from his downtown Richland Drug Company in 1916. The Kendall family remained prominent in the Barhamville area and still held property there well into the 1950s.
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Francis Drake Kendall. Image courtesy The State Newspaper
