Robert Blaxton

In August 1850, Robert Blaxton appeared on a financial document detailing wages owed to White House domestic workers compiled shortly after President Millard Fillmore took office. The list included staff names, as well as their position, salary, and race. Blaxton was recorded among Black staff (alongside Benjamin Quarles; William Williams, Charles Beal, Mary Ann Day, and Julia Ball) and identified as a fireman earning $10 per month; in this role, Blaxton would have tended the various fireplaces and furnaces in the Executive Mansion.¹Some of the individuals on the list also worked under Fillmore’s predecessor, Zachary Taylor, but it is unclear if Blaxton did as well as there are no known records proving this.²

It is also unclear how long Blaxton held this role, but there is no evidence yet found that he worked at the White House under Fillmore’s successor, President Franklin Pierce, which suggests Blaxton stopped working there before Pierce’s Inauguration in March 1853. At this point, nothing else is known about Blaxton.³ 

Thank you to Michael Cohen and Amy Larrabee Cotz, editors of the Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore papers, for providing research assistance with this biography.