CHRISTIANA CARTEAUX BANNISTER

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In the early 1850s Christiana Carteaux opened the first of at least four successive hairdressing salons on Boston’s Washington Street. In 1855, she opened a second salon in Providence, Rhode Island while continuing to operate her Boston salon. In 1857 she operated two salons in Boston, one on Washington Street, the other on West Street. In her Liberator advertisements, Madame Carteaux announced that she would “attend to Cutting and Dressing Ladies’ and Children’s Hair, Dyeing and Shampooing,” that she had “a Hair Restorative, which cannot be excelled, as it produces new hair where baldness has taken place,” and that she could create “all kinds of Hair Work made to order.” In 1856, the “Hair Doctress” announced that “Having recently removed from 284 to 365 Washington Street, where she has a superior suite of rooms, she now advertises a separate room for Hair Drying.” Even after moving to Providence in 1869, Madame Carteaux continued to maintain a Boston salon through 1872 and a salon in Providence until 1900.

Christiana Babcock Carteaux was born in North Kingstown, Rhode Island to Narragansett and African American parents. When she moved to open her hairdressing and wig-making salon in Boston, she joined abolitionist and artistic activities in black Boston. In 1853, she hired a young barber and aspiring artist, Edward M. Bannister, whom she married in 1857 in Boston’s Temple Street Episcopal Church. By 1858, Bannister was no longer listed as a barber, but as an artist, in the Boston Directories. Christiana Carteaux Bannister’s entrepreneurial success enabled Bannister to become an accomplished full-time artist. Bannister himself recognized her contributions to his career, “I would have made out very poorly had it not been for her, and my greatest successes have come through her, either through her criticism of my pictures or the advice she would give me in the matter of placing them in public.”

Throughout her life, Christiana Carteaux Bannister was a community activist and philanthropist. As president of the Colored Ladies Relief Society, she presented the state flag to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment in 1863. Following the regiment’s courageous attack on Fort Wagner, she organized a fair to raise funds to aid the widows and children of soldiers killed in battle. She served as president of the Colored Ladies Sanitation Commission in Boston in the 1860s and co-founded the Home for Aged Colored Women in Providence in the 1890s.

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