Virginia City

“ Unlike many of the other states in the United States, Virginia does not have any village type of government.
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Cities having at least ten thousand persons are eligible to be classified as cities of the first class; cities having less than ten thousand persons are eligible to be classified as the second class. Cities in Virginia have generally followed a three-fold plan or pattern of development: first, an area is established, then incorporated as a town and finally elevated to city status as an independent municipality. ”

“ Virginia City, the wild young metropolis of the new Silver State. Fortunes are made there in a day. There are instances on record of young men going to this place without a shilling—poor and friendless—yet by energy, intelligence, and a careful disregard to business, they have been enabled to leave there, owing hundreds of pounds. ”

“ Virginia can never be a pretty city, but in many respects it is a model one. The earlier log-houses are now giving way to substantial stores of granite; and the number of gambling and tippling shops is steadily decreasing, the buildings being taken up by the wholesale traders. An organized city government preserves strict police regulations. Two thriving churches have grown up, and very recently the principal merchants have agreed to close their houses on the Sabbath. The old residents are bringing in their wives and children, and society constantly gains in tone. ”

“ The Virginia gentleman, wherever met, was a country gentleman or a lawyer among a society of planters. The absence of city life was the sharpest character­istic of Virginia, even compared with South Carolina. In the best and greatest of Virginians, the virtues which always stood in most prominence were those of the field and farm,—the simple and straightforward mind, the notions of courage and truth, the absence of mercantile sharpness and quickness, the rusticity and open-handed hospitality, which could exist only where the struggle for life was hardly a struggle at all. ”

“ Virginia, with its stately warehouses and gay shops; its splendid streets, paved with silver ore; its banking houses and faro-banks; its attractive coffee-houses and elegant theatre, its music halls and its three daily newspapers.
Virginia is very wild, but I believe it is now pretty generally believed that a mining city must go through with a certain amount of unadulterated cussedness before it can settle down and behave itself in a conservative and seemly manner. Virginia has grown up in the heart of the richest silver regions in the world, the El Dorado of the hour ”

“ There are thirty-two independent cities: Alexandria, Bristol, Buena Vista, Charlottesville, Clifton Forge, Colonial Heights, Covington, Danville, Falls Church, Fredericksburg, Galax, Hampton (formerly, a second class city; now combined with the town of Phoebus and Elizabeth City County into a first class city since 1952) , Harrisonburg, Hopewell, Lynchburg, Martinsville, Newport News, Norfolk, Norton, Petersburg, Portsmouth, Radford, Richmond, Roanoke, South Boston, South Norfolk, Staunton, Suffolk, Virginia Beach, Waynesboro, Williamsburg and Winchester. ”

“ When Newport News and Warwick became the city of Newport News on July 1, 1958, this was the first city to be consolidated in the Commonwealth since Richmond and Manchester combined in 1910.
There are three types or forms of City Government in existence in Virginia: Mayor-Council form, Commission form and City Manager form. The city charter bears a similar relation to the city that the Virginia Constitution bears to the state. The citizens within the city area may decide for themselves the type of city government they prefer when they apply for their city charter. ”

“ Williamsburg and Norfolk. By 1800, only six additional towns were incorporated: Alexandria, Winchester, Fredericksburg, Richmond, Petersburg and York (Yorktown) . Yorktown is the only town incorporated before 1800 which has not become a city.
A unique characteristic about cities in Virginia is the fact that an incorporated city is politically separate from the county in which it is geographically located. ”

“ Cities and towns make up the next political level of government organization in Virginia as described in Article VIII of the constitution. A city is defined in the constitution as an incorporated community which has within defined boundaries a population of five thousand or more; a town is an incorporated community which has within defined boundaries a population of less than five thousand. In determining such population, the last census of the United States or an enumeration made by authority of the General Assembly must be used as the basis. ”

“ At least by 1623, it was the desire of the Virginia Company of London to build towns in Virginia which would possess a convenient and suitable number of houses, constructed together of brick and encircled by a battlemented brick wall. Exactly in the same way Cecilius Calvert, Lord Baltimore, commanded the first Maryland settlers to lay out row houses in their first settlement.
And also, Jamestown excavations have borne out the fact that the typical city building was usually a row affair. The few rural homes within the city limits may not be classified as "town" houses. ”

“ By the time we reached Virginia City I was considered a remarkable good shot and a fearless rider for a girl of my age. ”

“ General boundaries for English settlement were designated in the charter of 1606 creating the London Company and the Plymouth Company to settle the area in America known as Virginia. The London Company was authorized to settle a tract of land 100 miles square in the southern part of the area extending from the thirty-fourth to the forty-first degrees north latitude, or from the Cape Fear River in present North Carolina to New York City. ”

“ The Treasurer and Companie of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony in Virginia to Captain George Yeardley, Elect Governor of Virginia, and to the Council of State there being or to be, greeting:
Our former cares and endeavours have been chiefly bent to the procuring and sending people to plant in Virginia so to prepare a way and to lay a foundation whereon a flourishing state might, in process of time by the blessing of Almighty God, be raised. ”

“ Richmond, Va., capital of Virginia and county-seat of Henrico County, is situated on the left bank of James River, about 150 miles from its mouth and 115 from Washington. The James supplies immense water-power; and the city contains nearly 1,000 manufacturing establishments, with a capital amounting to many million dollars. The chief of these are tobacco-factories, rolling-mills, iron-foundries, wagon and carriage works, lumber-mills and a railroad-car factory. ”

“ When the statute of 1680 became a law, there was a general impression that one of the towns to be established under its terms would be selected as the metropolis of Virginia, and in consequence many persons who would have otherwise felt differently and probably acted accordingly, were indisposed to build residences at Jamestown. The expressed wish of the King that the members of the Council and other citizens of prominence and influence should set an example to the population at large by establishing homes at that place, failed to have a general effect. ”

“ As the planters were thus supplied with most of the necessaries of life, there was no occasion for the kind of trade that builds up towns. Even in comparatively recent times the development of town life in Virginia has been very slow. In 1880, out of 246 cities and towns in the United States with a population exceeding 10,000, there were only six in Virginia. ”

“ All difficulty about filling up the "local department" ceased, and the only trouble now was how to make the lengthened columns hold the world of incidents and happenings that came to our literary net every day. Virginia had grown to be the "livest" town, for its age and population, that America had ever produced. The sidewalks swarmed with people—to such an extent, indeed, that it was generally no easy matter to stem the human tide. The streets themselves were just as crowded with quartz wagons, freight teams and other vehicles. The procession was endless. ”

“ The total population of the state increased by 18% during the decade 1950-1960. However, during the same decade, Virginia changed in population rank from the fifteenth place among the forty-eight states to the sixteenth place among the fifty states. The ten most populated cities in Virginia are Norfolk, Richmond, Newport News, Portsmouth, Roanoke, Alexandria, Hampton, Lynchburg, Danville and Petersburg. During the past decade, the population of three cities has been materially increased through annexation. ”

“ Almost from the foundation of the settlement at Jamestown, Virginia was an important dependence of the mother country, not only as a land to which those who desired to establish new homes could emigrate, but as a community which, as its population expanded, required an ever enlarging volume of artificial supplies. ”

“ The West was settled by an influx of population which, under the homestead law, became at once a community of small landowners, but in Virginia in the seventeenth century, the mass of the inhabitants were men and women who had no interest in the soil. ”

“ In 1716 an expedition of Governor Alexander Spotswood over the mountains advertised to the world the rich back-country, now known as the Valley of Virginia; a migration thither from Pennsylvania and from Europe followed which revolutionised the province. The majority of blacks over whites soon gave way before the influx of white immigrants, and in 1756 there was a population of 292,000, of whom only 120,000 were negroes, and the small farmer class had grown so rapidly that the old tide-water aristocracy was in danger of being overwhelmed. ”

“ There are even yet to be found, on the borders of James River and in other parts of Virginia, the wealthy, intelligent, and hospitable planter, living in style and entertaining with liberality scarcely unequal to that which distinguished Virginia in bygone days. ”

“ That all these Goods are to be transported to England, so that in reality Virginia would be only as a Yard or Work-House where these Servants and Journeymen would labour for the English; besides several of these Things are such as we are wholly or in part supplied with from other Nations; and certainly we had better have Goods of the Produce of our own People and Countries, than buy them of Strangers, who make them for us ”

“ The implications of the United States Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1954 upon the public school system of Virginia have presented to the Commonwealth one of its most difficult problems of the Twentieth Century.
As the population of Virginia cities and towns has grown during the past two decades, persons have moved to the suburbs and surrounding territory—sometimes at a faster rate than the increase in new population in the urban centers. ”

“ It clearly emerges as an established settlement in 1624 when its population was given at twenty-five persons including at least four families with servants and dependents. That same year it sent its own burgess to the Assembly at Jamestown, its most prominent resident, Richard Kingsmill. Early in 1625 the population stood at eighteen, six freemen, three women, three children, five servants and a single negro. A comparison of the names given in 1624 with those in 1625 points up the shifting of persons that must have been a part of the Virginia scene at this time. ”

“ No more powerful influence could have been set in motion for increasing the volume of population in Virginia. The extent of land to be obtained by compliance with other conditions and even by the purchase of shares was necessarily small in comparison with the area which would be acquired by this means. The conveyance of title upon the strength of the head right furnished the practical assurance that the appropriation of the soil would not outstrip too far the growth in the number of inhabitants. ”

“ Washington said the central counties of Virginia were the best land in the United States. Daniel Webster, reporting to Virginians of his European tour, said he saw no lands in Europe so good as the valley of the Shenandoah. Virginia is rich in mountain pastures favourable to sheep and horned cattle. Nature gives Virginia everything that can be asked of nature. What a position for agriculture, manufactures, mining, commerce! Norfolk is a hundred miles nearer Chicago than New York is, but she has no intercourse with Chicago. It is three hundred miles nearer the mouth of the Ohio ”

“ Richmond, the capital of Virginia, has about one hundred and thirty thousand population, and occupies a delightful situation. The James River flows around a grand curve from the northwest to the south, and pours over falls and rapids, which display many little cascades among a maze of diminutive islands. There are on the northern bank two or three large hills and several smaller ones, and Richmond is built upon these, it is said like Rome upon her seven hills. The State Capitol and a broad white penitentiary crown two of the highest. ”

“ With the influx of the Cavaliers and with the reputation of the prosperity of the Virginia Colony, the number of middle class and upper class residents increased considerably during the Eighteenth Century until such residents soon made up a majority of the inhabitants. By 1700, the population of Virginia was approximately 70,000 including about 5,500 Negroes. ”