Richmond, Virginia

“ There is in Virginia a grim and sterile region the name of which no American ever hears without a shudder. When you speak to him of the Wilderness, the phantom armies rise before him and he hears the thunder of the guns as the vast struggle sweeps through its shades. He sees, too, the legions of the dead strewn in the forest, a mighty host, and he sighs to think so many of his countrymen should have fallen in mutual strife.
It is a land that deserves its name. Nature there is cold and stern. The rock crops up and the thin red soil bears only scrub forest and weary bushes. ”

“ From the terraced banks of the Rappahannock, sixty miles north of Richmond, to the shining reaches of the James, where the capital of the Confederacy stands high on her seven hills, the lowlands of Virginia are clad with luxuriant vegetation. The roads and railways run through endless avenues of stately trees; the shadows of the giant oaks lie far across the rivers, and ridge and ravine are mantled with the unbroken foliage of the primeval forest. ”

“ Richmond was a snug little town, a capital of no great size even in a region then lacking in city growth, but for the time more was said about it and more eyes were turned upon it than upon any other place in the world. Many thousands of men were dying in an attempt to reach this small Virginia city, and many other thousands were dying in an equally strenuous effort to keep them away. ”

“ The State Capitol Square (10 acres) is not owned by the city. Half a mile N.W. of the city are the Fair Grounds, where a state fair is held annually.
Of Richmond's public buildings, several have great historic interest. St John's Episcopal church, built in 1740 (and subsequently much enlarged) , is noted especially as the meeting-place of the Virginia Convention of March 1775, before which Patrick Henry made a famous speech, ending, “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, Give me liberty, or give me death!” ”

“ The site of Richmond is of great natural beauty. It is regularly laid out on a succession of low hills that rise from the northern bank of the James, the highest point reaching an altitude of 250 feet above the sea. The area is about 51⁄2 square miles. More than three-fourths of the total street mileage (120 miles) is paved, macadam and Belgian blocks being used in the more important thoroughfares. The parks and cemeteries of Richmond and its momunents are of especial interest. ”

“ If natural scenery reflects itself upon the heart, no wonder a "holy calm" rested upon this family, for far down the river the prospect was peace and tranquillity; and many an evening in the summer-house on the river bank we drank in the beauty of soft blue skies, green isles, and white sails floating in the distance.
Many in Richmond remember the delightful weddings and parties at Powhatan Seat, where assembled the élite from Richmond, with an innumerable throng of cousins, aunts, and uncles from Orange and Culpeper counties. ”

“ Richmond is served, by the Atlantic Coast Line, the Chesapeake & Ohio, the Seaboard Air Line, the Southern and the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac railways, and by the Old Dominion, the Virginia Navigation and the Chesapeake steamship lines. The city has a beautiful situation on the hilly ground (maximum elevation, about, 250 ft. above sea-level) along the north and east banks of the James, at a bend where the river changes its south-easterly course for one almost due south. ”

“ In the transformation she has sacrificed few of her landmarks, none of that delightful personality that makes itself apparent to those who tarry for a little time within her gates. That makes it all the better.
It is the spirit of the new South that is not only bringing such wonderful towns as Birmingham, to make a single instance, to the front, but is working the transformation of such staunch old settlements as Memphis or Atlanta—or Richmond. Not that Richmond is willing to forget the past. There is something about the Virginia spirit that seems incapable of death. ”

“ In Richmond, Virginia, the same unhappy classes bore, among the blacks, the ratio of one to every forty-six, and among the whites, of one to every one hundred and twelve. By this test, then, the white people of Richmond are three 345 times as happy and moral as the white people of Boston, and the negroes of Richmond have proportionably one-third less crime than the white people of Boston, and are nearly three times as moral as the free blacks of that city. ”

“ May 23.—The Congress at Montgomery, having sat with closed doors almost since it met, has now adjourned till July the 20th, when it will reassemble at Richmond, in Virginia, which is thus designated, for the time, capital of the Confederate States of America. Richmond, the principal city of the old Dominion, is about one hundred miles in a straight line south by west of Washington. The rival capitals will thus be in very close proximity by rail and by steam, by land and by water. The movement is significant. ”

“ Chapter I At dusk on the evening of the twenty-sixth of March, in the year 1807, there arrived in Richmond, Virginia, over the road from Fredericksburg, a stagecoach bearing a party of seven men. It pulled up on Main Street before the Eagle Tavern, one of the leading hostelries of the town, where in the growing darkness the passengers descended without attracting great attention. ”

“ In 1676, during “Bacon’s Rebellion,” a party of Virginians under Bacon’s command killed about 150 Indians who were defending a fort on a hill a short distance east of the site of Richmond in the “Battle of Bloody Run,” so called because the blood of the slain savages is said to have coloured the brook (or “run”) at the base of the hill. Colonel William Byrd, [2] who owned much land along the James river, at the falls, visited the tract in September 1733, and decided to found there the town of Richmond, at the same time selecting and naming the present site of Petersburg. ”

“ They had been promised affluence, Richmond was to be the metropolis of the Confederacy, and Virginia the all-powerful State of the new nation. How terrible the cheat! Their thousand-dollar bonds were not worth a penny. A million dollars would not purchase a dinner. Their money was valueless, their slaves were freemen, the heart of their city was in ashes. They had been deluded in everything. Those whom they had most trusted had most abused their confidence ”

“ If you wish to see the real Old South in Richmond go out to Hollywood cemetery, which is perhaps the greatest of all its landmarks. It is easy of access, very beautiful, although not in the elaborate and immaculate fashion of Greenwood, at Brooklyn, or Mount Auburn, just outside of Boston. But where man has fallen short at Hollywood, Nature has more than done her part. She rounded the lovely hills upon which Richmond might place the treasure-chest of her memories, and then she swept the finest of all Virginia rivers—the James—by those hills. ”

“ Just as New York looks newer than Boston, but is actually older, Norfolk looks newer than Richmond. Business and population grow in Richmond, but you do not feel them growing as you do in Norfolk. You feel that Richmond business men already have money, whereas in Norfolk there is less old wealth and a great deal more scrambling for new dollars. Also you feel that law and order count for more in Richmond than in Norfolk, and that the strict prohibition law which not long ago became effective in Virginia will be more easily enforced in the capital than in the seaport. ”

“ Of the seven hundred thousand men, which were claimed as under arms for the preservation of the Union, in the beginning of 1862, it is reasonably certain that more than a half million were actually in the field, and of these at least one-half, were operating in Virginia, with Richmond as the common goal of their eager and expectant gaze. ”

“ In April, 1619, Sir George Yeardley arrived. Of the emigrants who had been sent over at great cost, not one in twenty then remained alive. "In James Citty were only those houses that Sir Thomas Gates built in the tyme of his government, with one wherein the Governor allwayes dwelt, and a church, built wholly at the charge of the inhabitants of that citye, of timber, being fifty foote in length and twenty foot in breadth." At Henrico, now Richmond, there were no more than "three old houses, a poor ruinated Church, with some few poore buildings in the Islande." ”

“ The official and civil society of the capital never coalesced well. The old families of Richmond, interwoven with nearly three centuries of life in Virginia, did not like all these new people coming merely with the stamp of the Government upon them, which was often, so they thought, no stamp at all; but with the ceaseless and increasing pressure from the North they met now on common ground at the President's official reception, mingling without constraint.
Prescott danced three times with Helen Harley and walked twice with her in the halls. ”

“ We’re not gadabouts. Our girls haven’t all flirted around Europe and they don’t talk of the Pincio and the Champs Elysées as if they were Capitol Hill and Madison Street in Richmond. But if I may say so, sah, I think in Virginia we get a little closer to life as God Almighty intended it than people in some of your big cities.”
“Come, Bristow,” interrupted the doctor, “tell [Pg 209] the truth. This dog-gone borough is as dull as a mud fence sticking with tadpoles. There isn’t a man in it with a soul above horse-flesh.” ”

“ To this city also came trade from the Shenandoah Valley, and even from the Piedmont came peltry trains and droves of cattle and hogs to the same market. [94] The increase of settlement on the upper James resulted in the establishment of the city of Richmond at the falls of the river in 1737. Already the tobacco-planting aristocracy of the lowlands were finding rivals in the grain-raising area of interior Virginia and Maryland. Charleston prospered as the up-country of the Carolinas grew. ”

“ The adjoining Museum building contains a growing collection of permanent Richmond exhibits and the largest costume department in the south. The Indian collection emphasizes archaeological material from Virginia and North Carolina. Changing exhibitions illustrate past and present city activities and interests. Facing the garden is the Studio of the sculptor, Edward V. Valentine. The Bransford-Cecil Memorial House, in the Greek Revival style of the 1840’s, contains a gallery-lecture room; a Research Library, with extensive pictorial material illustrating Richmond’s history ”

“ Save in Virginia’s great debate on the ratification of the Constitution in the convention of 1788 Richmond had never before seen such a colorful and distinguished assemblage.
For days strangers had been descending on the city from all sides until the taverns and inns were filled to capacity. The hardier stock from the western outposts of the Commonwealth did not even try to find accommodations: they brought tents with them and camped on the low ground beside the river. ”

“ This practice of sending wives continued for some time, and as homes with pleasant society grew up in Virginia, life began to be made attractive there and the immigration rapidly increased. By 1622 the population of Virginia was at least 4,000, the tobacco fields were flourishing and lucrative, durable houses had been built and made comfortable with furniture brought from England, and the old squalor was everywhere giving way to thrift. The area of colonization was pushed up the James River as far as the site of Richmond. ”

“ Richmond has many fine monuments and statues of historic interest and artistic merit, the most noteworthy of the former being the Washington Monument, in Capitol Square. In 1850 the commission accepted the model submitted by Thomas Crawford (1814–1857) , an American sculptor, the corner-stone of the monument was laid in that year, and the equestrian statue of Washington, with sub-statues of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, was unveiled on the 22nd of February 1858. ”

“ With Richmond as his home during the autumn and winter, he was busily engaged in lecturing, in making preparations for the physical survey of the material and mineral resources of Virginia, in distributing cinchona seeds which had been sent to him from England, in trying to arouse interest in the establishment of an agricultural school in connection with the Virginia Military Institute, and in working in the interest of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and the establishment of a direct line of steamers from Norfolk to Flushing. ”

“ We desire that each and all of our readers should keep before them the fact that there is an Association incorporated by the State of Virginia, whose trust it is to obtain funds for a monument to be erected at Richmond in memory of General Robert E. Lee. We will not offend good taste by offering a word in commendation of this effort to do honor to the great captain; we the rather assume that every reader of these Papers will gladly and promptly forward a liberal contribution to the Treasurer at Richmond. ”

“ Richmond is the leading manufacturing city of Virginia, the value of its factory products in 1905 being $28,202,607, an increase of 22·4% since 1900 and nearly 19% of the value of the state’s factory products in this year. The chief industry is the manufacture of tobacco for smoking and chewing, of cigars and cigarettes and of snuff. ”

“ The public park system, with an aggregate area of 376 acres, includes Reservoir Park of 300 acres on the western bounds of the city; Monroe, Gamble's Hill, Jefferson, Marshall, and Chimborazo parks, besides the Capitol Square. Capitol Square, on Shockoe Hill in the heart of Richmond, is 12 acres in extent. Here is situated the State Capitol (1785-96) , modeled at the suggestion of Thomas Jefferson, after the Maison Carrée at Nîmes. In the Capitol are busts and portraits of many eminent men, including the celebrated marble statue of Washington by the French sculptor Houdon in the rotunda. ”