Robert J Wilkinson

Daguerreotype by Thomas M. Easterly, ca. 1860 Missouri History Museum Archives

Daguerreotype of Robert J Wilkinson, a barber who worked at the Southern Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri. Wilkinson owned a popular barbershop in the Planters' House Hotel and was named in Cyprian Clamorgan's 1858 pamphlet, 'The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis' to be one of the forty-three free Blacks in St. Louis who, as he described, "move in a certain circle; who by means of wealth, education, or natural ability, form a peculiar class- the elite of the colored people." In the early 1840s Wilkinson moved from Cincinnati to St. Louis and was one of the 1400 free blacks that lived in St. Louis out of the estimated 2100 free blacks at this time in 1850.

Source: Dolores A. Kilgo's. Likeness and Landscape: Thomas M. Easterly and the Art of the Daguerreotype