Avery Baylor: A Cut Above for Nearly Five Decades
Long before Avery Baylor opened the doors of Sagittarius in Montross, long before he owned multiple salons and a clothing store, or invented and patented a pillow designed to protect a freshly styled head of hair, he was just an eight-year-old boy standing on a soda crate in his father’s country store trying to reach his customers.
Avery grew up in Westmoreland County in the Flat Iron area, one of five children born to Calvin and Vernell Baylor. His parents operated Baylor’s Store, a country store that served as a community gathering place, complete with pool tables, a jukebox, and a steady stream of customers.
“I grew up around people all my life,” Baylor said.
His father also cut hair, but Avery’s training came mostly from watching and figuring things out for himself. By second grade, he was experimenting on his own hair and eventually began cutting hair for customers who came through the store.
He charged his first customer 25 cents. When the customer, who just happened to be his uncle, returned a month later, Avery raised the price to 50 cents. His uncle decided that was too much and went home to cut his own.
“I said, ‘I can’t even go up a quarter,’” Avery recalled, laughing.
The price may have been negotiable, but the career was already taking shape.
Avery cut hair after school and on weekends, learning to shape hairlines with a razor before the small detail trimmers used today were available. He even remembers taking a razor to school and squeezing haircuts into bathroom breaks.
By the time he reached Washington and Lee High School, Avery had built a real clientele. Afros were popular, and while some older barbers weren’t interested in cutting the fuller styles younger men wanted, Baylor was.
He also played basketball, sometimes doing double duty on game days. Principal Joe Tompkins wanted his players looking sharp when they traveled, so Avery would cut his teammates’ hair before putting on his own uniform and taking the court.
After graduating in 1973, Avery left for Washington, D.C., that very same day. He enrolled at Strayer Business College on a basketball scholarship and studied merchandising and retailing. Inspired by the Black-owned clothing stores he saw in Washington, he dreamed of opening one of his own.
His time in college was brief. The basketball program was discontinued before he played a game, and after one semester, Avery realized traditional classroom study wasn’t for him.
Hair, however, had been there all along.
Avery approached a barber near his Adams Morgan neighborhood and asked where he could attend barber school. The man asked him a simpler question: Could he cut hair?
Avery could.
The barber was preparing to open his own shop and hired Avery as his first employee. He stayed for about three and a half years, working with men and women and learning to cut a variety of hair textures. He also attended classes and hair shows, soaking up everything he could.
“I just was like a dry sponge,” Avery said.
Among the stylists he learned from was Paul Mitchell, years before the name became synonymous with hair products. Baylor remembers him as a talented stylist who was creating looks others weren’t doing at the time, including asymmetrical cuts.
By 1977, however, home was calling.
Avery returned to Montross and opened Sagittarius, named for his astrological sign, and already had customers waiting. While living in D.C., he had continued returning to Westmoreland County on weekends to cut hair, eventually coming home every other weekend because business was so busy.
Forty-nine years later, he is still here.
His career, though, has rarely been limited to one styling chair. Not long after returning home, Avery pursued his earlier dream of owning a clothing store. He bought the Montross building that now houses Angelo’s Restaurant and divided it, operating his salon on one side and a clothing store on the other.
When the early-1980s recession made the clothing business difficult, Avery returned his focus to hair. He eventually rented the building to become Angelo’s and moved Sagittarius back to its present location.
Meanwhile, one salon had become several.
At one point, Avery operated six Sagittarius salons, with locations in Montross, Kilmarnock, Fredericksburg, Ashland, Culpeper and Richmond. The salons were successful, but managing multiple locations eventually became more stressful than he wanted.
Ultimately, Avery returned to what had worked from the beginning: one salon, his own hands, and the customers sitting in his chair.
Many of those customers have stayed with him for decades. Some families have been coming to Avery for as many as four generations.
“I love that loyalty,” he said.
Although styles have changed dramatically since the days of Afros and razor-shaped hairlines, Avery believes good hair begins with something timeless.
“The most important thing in a hairstyle is the cut,” he said.
Learn the fundamentals well, he says, and adapting to changing trends becomes much easier. Avery doesn’t do extensions, hairpieces, or braids. His specialty remains what he calls “real hair”—particularly the precision haircut.
“I try to do the best I possibly can, each and every time,” he said. “I don’t care how long I’ve been doing it.”
That willingness to learn and try new things has carried far beyond the salon.
In the 1990s, Avery turned a problem mentioned by his female clients into an invention. Women with elaborate hairstyles told him they sometimes slept with their heads resting on their hands to keep from flattening their hair against a pillow.
The result was the StyleKeeper, a specially designed pillow that supported the head while protecting a hairstyle. Baylor created an early model, worked with a university in the Hampton area on a prototype, obtained a patent, and raised approximately $150,000 from investors.
The StyleKeeper reached the shelves of a local Walmart for a time, and Avery also approached QVC in hopes of gaining national distribution. Without the money required for large-scale advertising, however, getting consumers to know about the product proved difficult.
Still, the patent hangs on the salon wall today.
His entrepreneurial energy also extended to the land where he grew up. Avery’s father built a lake there when Avery was a child. Years later, Baylor purchased 45 acres of his grandfather’s land surrounding the pond and developed Baylor Lake Estates. Although he had never driven a tractor, he bought one, worked with a surveyor, and built the road to state specifications. Today, the development includes a dozen homes.
For Avery, it was a way to preserve and make use of family land rather than allowing it to pass into someone else’s hands.
His roots in Westmoreland run deep. Baylor has four daughters, three granddaughters, and a grandson who he loves dearly. Outside the salon, he enjoys the beach, making wine, learning to play guitar, gardening, traveling, and he recently painted his ‘89 Corvette all by himself.
“I am just trying to improve each day,” he said.
Perhaps that same philosophy helps explain nearly half a century behind the chair.
Avery hopes to work at least another five years, although he admits hairstylists have a way of never completely retiring. For now, he is taking it “one day at a time, one year at a time.”
Almost 50 years after that little boy climbed onto a soda crate in Baylor’s Store, Avery Baylor is still doing what he did then—looking carefully, working with his hands, and cutting until it looks right.
After thousands of haircuts, multiple businesses, six salons, a housing development, and a patented invention, he knows exactly what he hopes people will remember him for:
“One of the best barbers and hairstylists in the country.”
After 49 years in Montross, generations of Northern Neck families would likely agree: Avery Baylor has earned the title.