Qualla: Elizabeth Harden Gilmore House

Elizabeth Harden Gilmore House: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pubdog (talk), Public domain. On a half-acre lot in a commercial block of Charleston, West Virginia, a brick Classical Revival house with a columned portico has stood since around 1900. For nearly half a century it was the home of Elizabeth Harden Gilmore - the first licensed African American female funeral director in West Virginia and one of the most quietly consequential civil rights organizers in the Kanawha Valley. The house held the family upstairs and the Harden and Harden Funeral Home downstairs. It also held the strategy sessions, the planning meetings, and the activists who built the Charleston sit-ins of 1958 to 1960. Elizabeth Gilmore was the woman behind much of that work. The house she lived in is on the National Register of Historic Places. The story of who she was is less widely told than it should be.

Image: Pubdog (talk) | Public domain

Elizabeth Harden Gilmore House: The Funeral Home

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pubdog (talk), Public domain. Elizabeth Harden was born in 1910 in Charleston. She trained as a funeral director at the Eckels College of Mortuary Science in Philadelphia and returned to Charleston with the credentials and the determination to practice. In 1940 she became the first licensed African American f...

Image: Pubdog (talk) | Public domain

Elizabeth Harden Gilmore House: Civil Rights Work

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pubdog (talk), Public domain. By the late 1950s, Elizabeth Gilmore had become a central figure in the Kanawha Valley's civil rights movement. She co-founded the Charleston chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and served as one of its principal organizers. In 1958, she helped lead a campaign to de...

Image: Pubdog (talk) | Public domain

Elizabeth Harden Gilmore House: Why the House Matters

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pubdog (talk), Public domain. Historic preservation usually trades in big structures and grand stories: capitols, mansions, courthouses, battlefields. The Elizabeth Harden Gilmore House is not big or grand. It is a brick house of modest scale on a city block whose surroundings have been substantially altered....

Image: Pubdog (talk) | Public domain

Elizabeth Harden Gilmore House: Walking Past Today

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pubdog (talk), Public domain. If you walk by the corner of Broad and Shrewsbury today, you will see a building that does not announce its history. The portico is still there. The brick is still mostly the original. The neighborhood around the house has shifted, with commercial buildings encroaching on what wa...

Image: Pubdog (talk) | Public domain