Place:Richmond, Henrico, Virginia, United States

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source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Richmond is the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Like all Virginia municipalities incorporated as cities, it is an independent city, not part of any county (Richmond County is unrelated, and located more than 53 miles (85 kilometers) distant in a different region of the state). Richmond is at the center of the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) and the Greater Richmond Area. It is surrounded by Henrico County and Chesterfield County. The city is located at the intersections of Interstate 95 and Interstate 64 in central Virginia.

Although the site of Richmond, at the fall line of the James River in the Piedmont region of Virginia, was briefly settled by English from Jamestown in 1607, near the site of a significant native settlement, the present City of Richmond was founded in 1737. It became the capital of the colony of Virginia in 1780. During the Revolutionary War period, several notable events occurred in the city, including Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" speech in 1775, and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1779, which was written by Thomas Jefferson in the city. During the American Civil War, Richmond served as the capital of the Confederate States of America, and many important civil war landmarks remain in the city today.

Richmond's economy is primarily driven by law and finance, with several notable legal and banking firms located in the downtown area. There are also nine Fortune 500 companies with corporate headquarters in the city, including Circuit City, Philip Morris USA, and Dominion Resources, among others. Richmond is also home to smaller companies which contribute to its small town, friendly, southern atmosphere, such as Ukrop's Super Market, a regional, family-owned chain of supermarkets, known for its remarkable customer service and friendly employees.

Residents of the city are commonly referred to as Richmonders, and they may refer to their city in everyday language as RVA, RIC (its airport code), or The 804 (its area code).

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

In 1607, James I granted a royal charter to the Virginia Company of London to settle colonists in North America. After the first permanent English settlement was established later that year at Jamestown, Captain Christopher Newport and Captain John Smith set sail ten days after landing at Jamestown, traveling northwest up the Powhatan River (now known as the James River) to Powhatan Hill. Smith's map records that there was a sizable Indian settlement at that site, also known as Powhatan, serving as one of the capitals of the Powhatan Indians' ruler, known to the English as Emperor Powhatan.

An expedition from Jamestown consisting of 120 men made the first attempt of the English to settle at the Falls of the James, located between the 14th Street Bridge in modern downtown Richmond and the Pony Pasture (a recreational area along the banks of the river south of the City of Richmond). The settlement was made at this location as it is the highest navigable site along the James River.

In 1673, William Byrd I was granted lands on the James River that included the area around Falls that would become Richmond and already included small settlements. Byrd became a well-connected fur trader in the area and established a fort on the site. William Byrd II inherited his father's land in 1704, and in 1737 he founded the town of Richmond at the Falls of the James and commissioned Major William Mayo to lay out the original town grid. Byrd named the city Richmond after the town of Richmond in England, a suburb of London. He gave the new town the name because the view of the James River in Richmond, Virginia is strikingly similar to the view of the Thames River from Richmond, England, where he had spent time during his youth. The new town became the seat of Henrico County, Virginia in 1752, which had been located in nearby Varina, Virginia (now a Richmond suburb) where John Rolfe and Pocahontas had established their farm the previous century and developed the new world's first commercially successful export product, tobacco. Also, Richmond has had successful iron factories, especially the iron factory controlled by Parker Skoonover.

Revolutionary War

In 1775, Patrick Henry delivered his famous “Give me Liberty or Give me Death” speech in St. John's Church in Richmond that was crucial for deciding Virginia's (then the largest of the 13 colonies) participation in the First Continental Congress and setting the course for revolution and independence. Both Thomas Jefferson, who would soon write the Declaration of Independence and George Washington, who would soon command the Continental Army were in attendance at this critical moment on the path to the American Revolution.

In 1780, Virginia’s state capital was moved from the colonial capital of Williamsburg to Richmond because it was less vulnerable to attack by the British. In 1781, under the command of Benedict Arnold, Richmond was burned by British troops causing Governor Thomas Jefferson to flee the city. Yet Richmond shortly recovered and, by 1782, Richmond was once again a thriving city.

Post-Revolution

In 1786, one of the most important and influential passages of legislation in American history was passed at the temporary state capital in Richmond, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Written by Thomas Jefferson and sponsored by James Madison, the statute was the basis for the separation of church and state, and led to freedom of religion for all Americans as protected in the religion clause in the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment. Its importance is recognized annually by the President of The United States, with January 16 established as National Religious Freedom Day.

The Virginia State Capitol building was designed by Thomas Jefferson and completed in 1788. It is the second-oldest US statehouse in continuous use (Maryland's is the oldest) and was the first US government building built in the classical Roman style of architecture, setting the trend for other state houses and the federal government buildings (including the White House and The Capitol) in Washington, DC. The state capitol is the only one in the United States that wasn't built with a dome.

Richmond soon emerged an important industrial center and crossroads of transportation and commerce. George Washington proposed and received the support of the Virginia legislature for the establishment of the James River and Kanawha Canal, the first canal system to be established in the U.S. The canal allowed goods and services coming up the James River to be navigated around the falls at Richmond and connect Richmond and the eastern part of Virginia with the west. As a result Richmond became home of some of the largest manufacturing facilities in the country, including iron works and flour mills, the largest facilities of their kind in the south. Canal traffic peaked in the 1860s and slowly gave way to railroads, allowing Richmond to become a major railroad crossroads, eventually including the site of the world's first triple railroad crossing. The Canal officially ceased operations in the 1880s and portions of the canal have been preserved and rebuilt in the late 1990s, spurring tourism and economic development along the old canal route in downtown Richmond.

Civil War

The aversion to the slave trade was growing by the mid-nineteenth century, and in 1848, Henry “Box” Brown made history by having himself nailed into a small box and shipped from Richmond to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, escaping slavery.

At the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, the strategic location of the Tredegar Iron Works was one of the primary factors in the decision to make Richmond the Capital of the Confederacy. From this arsenal came the 723 tons of armor plating that covered the CSS Virginia, the world’s first ironclad used in war, as well as much of the Confederates' heavy ordinance machinery. In February, 1861, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as President of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Alabama, the first Confederate capital. In the early morning of April 12, 1861, the Confederate army fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Civil War had begun. On April 17, 1861, Virginia seceded from the United States and joined the Confederate States, and soon thereafter the Confederate government moved its capital to Richmond. The Seven Days Battle, in which Union General McClellan threatened Richmond and came very near but ultimately failed to take the city, followed in late June and early July of 1862. Three years later on April 3, 1865, Ulysses S. Grant and the Union Army captured Richmond, and six days later, Robert E. Lee's retreating Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, symbolically ending the war. On April 2, 1865, about 25% of the city's buildings were destroyed in a fire set by retreating Confederate soldiers.

Monument Avenue was laid out in 1887, with a series of monuments at various intersections honoring the city's Confederate heroes. Included (east to west) were J.E.B. Stuart, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Matthew F. Maury. Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery is the final resting place of both Stuart and Davis.

Richmond had the first successful electrically-powered trolley system in the United States, the Richmond Union Passenger Railway. Designed by electric power pioneer Frank J. Sprague, the trolley system opened its first line in January, 1888. Richmond's hills, long a transportation obstacle, were considered an ideal proving ground. The new technology soon replaced horse-powered streetcars.

Twentieth Century

By the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the city's population had reached 85,050 in 5 square miles, making it the most densely populated city in the southern United States.

In 1903, African-American businesswoman and financier Maggie L. Walker chartered St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, and served as its first president, as well as the first female bank president in the United States. Today, the bank is called the Consolidated Bank and Trust Company, and it is the oldest surviving African-American bank in the U.S. The Governor's School in Richmond City is also dedicated to her name.

In 1910, the former city of Manchester was consolidated with the city of Richmond. In 1914, the city annexed the Barton Heights, Ginter Park, and Highland Park areas of Henrico County. In 1914, Richmond became the headquarters of the Fifth District of the Federal Reserve Bank. In 1919, at the end of World War I, Philip Morris was established in the city. The Fan district also began to develop during the 1920s.

Also during the 1920s, several entertainment venues developed that remain today. The city's first radio station, WRVA, first began broadcasting in 1925. The Mosque (now called the Landmark Theater) also opened in 1925. The Byrd Theater and Loew's Theater (now the Carpenter Center) opened in 1928.

In his autobiography, "The Moon's A Balloon". Academy award winning actor David Niven described how he was on a trip from New York to Florida in the late 1930s when he decided to spend the night at the famous Jefferson Hotel, located in downtown Richmond. Niven stated that as he was signing the guest registry at the Jefferson, his eyes snapped open with amazement when he noticed a full sized alligator swimming in a small pool located six feet from the reception desk. Alligators at The Jefferson would become world famous, and the last alligator living in the marble pools of the Jefferson's Palm Court, (named Old Pompey) remained at the Jefferson until he died in 1948.

Modern city development

Between 1963 and 1965, there was a huge, "downtown boom," that led to the construction of more than 700 buildings in the city. In 1968, Virginia Commonwealth University was created by the merger of the Medical College of Virginia with the Richmond Professional Institute. After several years of court cases in which Chesterfield County, Virginia fought annexation, Richmond gained 27 square miles of the county. More than 47,000 people who once were Chesterfield County residents found themselves in the city’s perimeters on January 1, 1970.

In 1984, the city completed the Diamond ballpark, a new home for the Richmond Braves, a AAA baseball team in the Atlanta Braves minor league system, replacing the old Parker Field. In 1985, Sixth Street Marketplace, a downtown shopping district, opened, operating until it was closed and demolished in 2004.

A multi-million dollar floodwall was completed in 1995, in order to protect the city and the Shockoe Bottom businesses from the rising waters of the James River. The floodwall was unable to protect Shockoe Bottom on August 31, 2004 when Tropical Storm Gaston dumped 14 inches of rain in downtown Richmond in less than five hours causing flash floods.

In 1996, a statue of Richmond native and tennis star Arthur Ashe was added amid controversy to the famed series of statues of Confederate heroes of the Civil War on Monument Avenue.

Recent renovations included the rebuilt James River and Kanawha Canal and Haxall Canal, now designed as a Canal Walk. The riverfront project has brought this 1.25-mile corridor back to life, with trendy loft apartments, restaurants, shops and hotels winding along the Canal Walk, along with canal boat cruises and walking tours. The National Park Service's Richmond Civil War Visitor Center, in the Tredegar Iron Works, brought three floors of exhibits and artifacts, films, a bookstore, picnic areas and more. The Cordish Company also began construction of Riverside on the James, a power plant development project with shopping and entertainment venues. Currently debate continues regarding the future of the Diamond ballpark and the location of a possible replacement.

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