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Lewis Washington Taylor, was born in December 1865 in Wakulla, Florida, the only child of James and Clara Taylor. He was a well-known educator, businessman and community leader. Though soft-spoken and small in stature, he carried himself in an aptly stoic manner. He taught at Centerville School, the original Lincoln High School and Bel Air, a one room rural school house for black children in Leon County, on ground which had once been an ante-bellum plantation. Taylor was a very prominent man in the community of Bel Air and he also taught and tutored the well-to-do children from white families for 10 cents. He was a leader in the Tallahassee NAACP, where he also sold Crisis Magazine for the organization. In addition, he sold the Pittsburgh Courier Newspaper. His Granddaughter, Lucille Alexander remembers "He read that paper from front to back before he sold it."

Taylor was the Grandfather of Aquilina Casanas Howell, who was Leon County's first black woman assistant school superintendent. Howell is credited with easing the transition from segregated to desegregated schools in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Taylor's uncanny ability to work across the color barrier that existed during the late 1800s proved invaluable. He was granted the opportunity to teach white children for pay, which was virtually unheard of. Most likely, he was the first black person to be allowed to teach white children in Leon County. Called Deacon Taylor, he was Superintendent of the Bethel Missionary Baptist Church Sunday School and a "stickler for education." Well-known throughout the community, Taylor would tip his hat to passerby as he walked Tallahassee's dirt roads. His land holdings included property on Fourth Avenue, and land near today's Griffin Middle School, where he and his family raised cows and chickens. He was self-employed as a proprietor of a Frenchtown jewelry store, making his jewelry out of gold wire, which he kept in a trunk in an upstairs bedroom. He died on September 24, 1931. The home he built in 1894, along with his wife Lucretia, is now the Taylor House Museum of Historic Frenchtown.