Nonesuch Place: A History of the Richmond Landscape

By T. Tyler Potterfield and Sarah Shields Driggs

Intentionally built on the fall line where the Piedmont uplands meet the Tidewater region, Richmond has always been a city defined by the land. From the time settlers built a city on rugged terrain overlooking the James River, the people have changed the land and been changed by it. Few know this better than T. Tyler Potterfield, a planner with the City of Richmond Department of Community Development. Whether considering the many roles of the "romantic, wild and beautiful" James River through the centuries, describing the rationale for the location of the Virginia State Capitol on Shockoe Hill or relating the struggle to reclaim green space as industrialization and urban growth threatened to remove nature from the city, Potterfield weaves a tale as ordered as the gridded streets of Richmond and just as rich in history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jun 2, 2009
• ISBN: 9781614232834

T. Tyler Potterfield

T. Tyler Potterfield has served as a historic preservation planner for the city of Richmond since 1992. Mr. Potterfield has extensive experience lecturing, writing and leading tours pertaining to Richmond's history, architecture and landscape, and in recent years, he has completed historic landscape reports of Capitol Square and Monroe Park. He and his wife, Maura Meinhardt, live and garden in the Oregon Hill Historic District, next to Hollywood Cemetery and not far from the James River.

Book preview

Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC 29403

www.historypress.net

Copyright © 2009 by T. Tyler Potterfield

All rights reserved

First published 2009

e-book edition 2012

ISBN 978.1.61423.283.4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Potterfield, T. Tyler.

Nonesuch place : a history of the Richmond landscape / T. Tyler Potterfield.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

print edition ISBN 978-1-59629-415-8

1. Richmond (Va.)--Historical geography. 2. Richmond (Va.)--Description and travel. 3.

Landscape--Virginia--Richmond. I. Title.

F234.R54P68 2009

975.5’451--dc22

2009013930

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is dedicated to my grandmothers,

who taught me to revere history and love landscapes.

No place we knew so strong, so pleasant and delightful in Virginia for which we called it Non-such.

–John Smith describing Powhatan, later the site of Richmond.

Nonesuch: An unmatched or unrivaled thing.

–Oxford English Dictionary

Contents

  Foreword, by Sarah Shields Driggs

  Preface

Chapter 1   A River Fit For Kings

  A River Primeval

  Muses and Prospects

  The Arcadian James

  Mastering the Naiads

Chapter 2   The Picturesque City

  All Hills, Valleys and Deep Ravines

  On the Square

Ruda Indigestaque Moles

  The Nations of Richmond

Chapter 3   Breathing Places

  Common Ground

  Public Squares

  Cutshaw’s Beautiful City

  Public Decorum

Chapter 4   Gardens of Graves

  Burial Grounds

  Rural Cemeteries

  Funerary Landscapes

  Visitation and Contemplation

Chapter 5   Countryside, Parks and Suburbs

  Countryside

  Parks

  Suburbs

  Afterword

  Note Abbreviations and Bibliography

  Notes

  Illustration Credits

  About the Author

Foreword

In order to really understand a city, a grasp of the forces that have shaped its structure is needed. Nonesuch Place: A History of the Richmond Landscape, a study of the development of Richmond’s landscape over four centuries, transforms an examination of urban growth into a view of the many facets of the city’s cultural, commercial and recreational life.

Richmonders have always been fascinated with their city and its architecture. Neighborhoods, streets, cemeteries and architects all have been represented in books and exhibits. For the most part, until now, no single work has addressed the space between and around the buildings, across the streets and fields and parks—the places where Richmonders have lived their public lives as a community. This is the story that Tyler Potterfield tells here.

Beginning with the James River, the reason that Richmond exists, and wandering through the public squares to the cemeteries, private gardens and suburbs, Nonesuch Place records the physical environment of the past. The geography includes granite quarries, coal mines and the Fall Line, a ledge that runs up and down the eastern seaboard, affecting navigation and settlement. These features explain the location of Richmond, a place rich in natural resources. Once settled, the citizens went about domesticating and enjoying their surroundings. Setting aside green space was not always a priority. Sometimes improvements were the result of community choice, as when the city’s squares were established, and sometimes through the efforts of a single person, such as Wilfred Cutshaw, who developed the city’s park system and urban forestry program.

The story alternates between design decisions that were specific to Richmond and those that reflect trends from elsewhere. For instance, Richmond is probably the only city that located a penitentiary on a prime lot overlooking the river, a mistake that was corrected much later. On the other hand, the use of a grid system for laying out the streets goes back to ancient civilizations, and Richmond’s development of picturesque rural cemeteries followed a mid-nineteenth-century American trend.

Potterfield’s research shows that cities are shaped by people who may not always be thinking of posterity but rather of getting a job done. His book comes at a crucial time for landscapes and cities. In an era when society is retracing the paths that have led away from nature, a chance to understand the process as it occurred locally is especially valuable. The decisions that are made today will have repercussions for generations, and it is important to plan carefully, with knowledge of the past.

Sarah Shields Driggs

Richmond, Virginia

February 20, 2009

Preface

This book is intended as a concise history of the landscape of Richmond. The specific use of Richmond in this context includes the entire corporate limits of Richmond as of 1942. This boundary and earlier corporate expansions illustrated in Map 11 encompass Manchester, a separately incorporated town until 1910; other towns annexed into the city in the twentieth century; and portions of Henrico and Chesterfield Counties annexed into Richmond at various times. Unless specifically noted otherwise, the book treats all of these areas as components of Richmond. The use of the term landscape in the narrative includes waterways, topography, vegetative cover, urban plans, designed landscapes and building forms. Using these general parameters, each of the five chapters of the book identify a particular facet of the Richmond landscape and how humans observed and interacted with it.

The timeline of the book begins with the interaction of Powhatan Native Americans and the English explorers in the early seventeenth century. It ends in 1942, the 200th anniversary of the incorporation of Richmond and the year that the City of Richmond began preparation of the first master plan. To keep readers from being left in 1942, without a clue as to what happened in intervening years, the afterword provides some observations that fill the void.

In writing this book, I have provided detailed citations for the first five chapters. I do this to encourage readers to explore sources on their own. Where scholars have done sound work, I have sometimes cited their studies alone without primary sources. For firsthand accounts and where important information is not adequately covered in secondary sources, I have cited primary sources. In cataloguing the images of this book, the entity from which it came is listed in the caption, and archival information is listed in the illustration credits. To make the endnotes as concise as possible, abbreviations are used. The abbreviations are keyed to full citations in the Note Abbreviations and Bibliography, which is alphabetized in accordance with the abbreviations.

The goal of this book is to give the reader a broad topical survey of the landscape rather than a strict chronological study. To help the reader maintain a chronological bearing, dates are included throughout the text. There are multiple historical and two contemporary maps that will guide the reader in locating the places discussed in the text. In the descriptions of locations, the reader will find that only the four cardinal points of the compass are used and that the James River has only a north and a south bank.

No historian prepares a book on his own, and that is certainly true of this one. At the top of the list of my collaborators is my wife Maura, who has been my companion on many field trips and has kept me fed, rested and reasonably happy during the preparation of the book. From the time I decided to become a history major in college, my parents have enthusiastically supported my pursuit of the past, for which I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude. I am grateful to Selden Richardson for reading an earlier draft of the book and providing me with helpful comments. Sarah Driggs has gone above and beyond the call of friendship by participating in editing sessions and writing the foreword for this book. Catherine Easterling’s skills as a proofreader proved most helpful in the preparation of the final manuscript.

I am grateful to the many individuals and organizations that provided me with information during my research; I am indebted to all of the agencies that allowed the use of their images in this text. Particular thanks must go to Ray Bonis at Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries Special Collections and Megan Glass Hughes at the Valentine Richmond History Center for spending long hours with me sharing the rich troves of images and documents at those institutions. I am greatly indebted to the Friends of Byrd Park for the sharing of its research abstract, Dale Wheary for providing me access to the images and research compiled by Maymont staff and volunteers over the years and Bill Conkle with the Richmond Recreation and Parks Foundation for several important leads regarding photographs and document sources. Great thanks must go to my dear friend Willie Anne Wright, who gave me great insights into Richmond around the mid-the twentieth century and put me on to her family’s great legacy, the Boschen papers at the Valentine Richmond History Center.

Some of my readers will find information in and conclusions of the book to which they will take exception. The writing of history is an ongoing process, and mistakes will be made. I look forward to any questions, criticisms and suggestions that might be offered.

Oregon Hill

Richmond, Virginia

President’s Day, 2009

CHAPTER 1

A River Fit For Kings

The title of this chapter derives from the high regard both the Native Americans of the Powhatan Confederacy and English explorers had for the river that passes through modern Richmond. Both groups referred to it as the King’s River, but they differed in regard to which king. The Native Americans named it in honor of their king, Powhatan, and the English in honor of their king, James I. Both the natives whose lives intertwined with the river for centuries and the English who had burst upon the scene abruptly shared a deep admiration for the river. The Richmond portion of the river formed a boundary for both groups. For the Powhatan Confederacy, it marked their western political boundary. As the explorers led by Christopher Newport in 1607 discovered, it was the end of tidal navigation, making it an inevitable site for the founding and growth of a city. It is also the central element around which all other aspects of the Richmond landscape more or less revolve, and without the river Richmond would not warrant the appellation of Nonesuch. This chapter will examine the natural state of the river, the viewing of its scenery, how people lived with the river and its economic exploitation.

A River Primeval

The Englishman David Mitchell, who retraced the route of the Newport party by steamboat, admired the scenery and found the river landscape full of English reminiscences in 1853. Perhaps the Newport party had similar thoughts and may have agreed with Mitchell’s observation of the similarity of the King’s River to the Thames River in England. Mitchell described the banks covered with dark luxuriant green old woods, and about 1810 William Wirt described the polished surface of this portion of the river. Captain John Smith accompanied the Newport party and left an account of its river ascent, noting that as the expedition navigated the river’s many bends they passed banks of plaine high ground, numerous springs and several native villages.

Illustration 1. View of Richmond in 1852 showing the tidal portion of the James River from the south bank with Mayo’s Island and Bridge in the center. Valentine Richmond History Center.

One of the