Abingdon was founded in 1778 but the surrounding hills of southwestern Virginia would remain frontier for many years to come. Before so-called civilization arrived the area was called Wolf Hills, supposedly named by Daniel Boone after his hunting dogs were attacked by a pack of predatory lupines. The first encroachment on the wilderness here was a fort constructed by Joseph Black to give settlers refuge from attacks by the Cherokee.
When Washington County was formed in 1778 the site of Black’s Fort was designated the county seat. On 120 acres donated from landowner Thomas Walker’s tract the town was laid out. By 1793 Abingdon, perhaps named for the ancestral home of Martha Washington, was the distribution point for all mail that made its way into southwestern Virginia.
In the early 1800s the western outpost produced well more than its share of historical figures who would impact Virginia. There was John Cambpell who would serve as Secretary of the Treasury under Andrew Jackson, Joseph E. Johnston, who would become one of the leading generals of the Confederacy and three Virginia governors: WyndhamRobertson (1836-37), David Campbell (1837-41) and John Buchanan Floyd (1849-52).
The Virginia & Tennessee Railroad rolled into town in 1856, providing a link to the markets of eastern Virginia and Abingdon developed into a center for the shipping of tobacco and the construction of wagons. The Civil War came to Abingdon on December 14, 1864 when General George Stoneman marched 10,000 Federal troops through town burning the train depot and the wagon-shops and storehouses for Confederate supplies but otherwise left the town intact.
The result today is a 20-block Historic Districtpeppered with outstanding examples of Federal architecture, including a handful constructed in the 1700s. Our explorations will begin at a structure that did not survive the Civil War, but not because of the hostilities between North and South - it was a personal thing...
This stretch of land along the west shore of the Potomac River was the last chunk of the Virginia Tidewater to be settled. In 1748, when Fairfax County was cleaved from Prince William County the town was created and named for a family that had once owned the land. Seventeen-year old George Washington was on the survey crew that laid off the town in streets and 84 half-acre lots. His half-brother Lawrence and brother Augustine were among the initial purchasers. George would later come to own a townhome as well and since it was only eight miles from his beloved estate at Mount Vernon always considered Alexandria his home town.
In 1752 Alexandria was made the county seat. The town was incorporated in 1779 and adopted a seal with a ship in full sail - a nod to the town’s position as one of the busiest ports in young America. Wheat was the main export but the warehouses on the waterfront were also filled with hogsheads of tobacco. The place became so attractive it was given away to the new Federal government to become part of the District of Columbia that was being built in 1799. In 1846 residents longing for a return to Virginia requested Congress to return Alexandria to the Old Dominion. Alexandria County was created and the town set up as its seat; in 1920 the county was changed to Arlington.
The Federal government returned shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War. It became the longest occupied territory of the war but because the city saw little fighting, Alexandria escaped the havoc that obliterated the early history of other Virginia cities. The wooden wharves are gone and the air is no longer permeated by the odor of fish and fertilizer but the streetscape is stuffed with Federal-style brick houses and some of the streets even retain their cobbles. Our exploration will poke around the third oldest historic district in the country and we’ll begin where the city did on the banks of the Potomac...
In the 1720s wealthy landowners began receiving land patents in this area but few came to settle on their estates. One who did was Peter Jefferson who acquired the estates of Shadwell and Monticello. And so it was that Charlottesville, named for the new young Queen of King George III, became the town of Thomas Jefferson and his University of Virginia.
The town was formed by charter in 1762 “for the reception of traders” and as a seat for Albemarle County that had been cut from a wide area on both sides of the James River in 1744. A county courthouse was constructed around which 50 acres were laid out in streets and building lots. This legacy of service as a commercial center never left the town that has seldom seen importance in industry. For most of its history Charlottesville has been a university and residential city.
Unlike many of its sister towns in Virginia, Charlottesville felt only a light brush with the American Revolution and Civil War. During the struggle for independence prisoners - mostly German mercenaries - from the Battle of Saratoga were detained here briefly and endured a raid by British Colonel Banastre Tarleton in 1781. There were no major Civil War battles in Charlottesville, which was used primarily as a hospital. Perhaps the biggest impact the military had on the town came via the Charlottesville Woolen Mills that organized in 1868 and for many years churned out the “cadet gray” material used for uniforms by the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Our explorations of Charlottesville will begin along the Downtown Mall, one of America’s iconic pedestrian malls and our first stop will be at the eastern end at the City Hall where three hometown Presidents look on...
Danville is a town built on tobacco, not the manufacture of it but the storage and transporting of it. In the early 1790s inland tobacco growers began agitating for a more convenient inspection station than Richmond or Petersburg and in 1793 the Virginia Assembly established a tobacco warehouse at Wynne’s Falls, a fording spot on the Dan River. Later in the year the village name was changed by the Legislature to Danville, the name coming from pioneering settler William Byrd who, in 1728, named the river.
In short order Danville would become Virginia’s largest market for bright leaf tobacco, laying claim to being the “World’s Best Tobacco Market.” By the Civil War Danville had evolved into a bustling town of 5,000. During the fighting the town’s cavernous tobacco warehouses were converted into hospitals and prisons. Starvation and dysentery, plus a smallpox epidemic in 1864, caused the death of 1,314 of these prisoners. Their remains now lie interred in the Danville National Cemetery. Danville was a major supply depot for the Confederacy but was never reached by Union troops.
Danville’s industrial era began in 1881 with the opening of a small yarn mill that would evolve into the largest single-unit textile mill in the world. Dan River textiles were known the country over. Fortunes made in tobacco and cotton showed themselves on Main Street as it stretched west away from the city clinging to the Dan River. While downtown Danville lost many of its most impressive buildings to fire and urban renewal energetic preservationists have kept this section of Main Street, known as Millionaire’s Row, looking much as it did in the town’s glory days.
Danville is home to some of the finest Victorian architecture in the South and our walking tour will work up and down Main Street (although topographically speaking down and then up) and we will start at the top of the hill with the house that launched Millionaire’s Row and witnessed the end of the Confederacy...
The first person to own the land that is now the City of Fairfax was Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron, who was awarded five million acres in land located in Northern Virginia by King Charles. When it came time for actually form a town the owner was Richard Ratcliffe who had begun acquiring land around the headwaters of Accotink Creek in 1786. Over the next decade he had grown his Mount Vineyard plantation to about 3,000 acres.
In the meantime the new federal government was moving to the banks of the Potomac and chief executive George Washington brought his hometown of Alexandria into the jurisdiction of the newly created District of Columbia. This moved Alexandria, the county seat of Fairfax County since its inception in 1752, out of the legal boundaries of its Virginia home county. With a mandate to find a centrally convenient new location for its county seat, Fairfax County Court officials accepted Richard Ratcliffe’s offer of four acres to build a courthouse upon. The price - a single dollar.
The courthouse was completed in 1800 and it became a prototype for many Virginia courthouses built until 1850. Ratcliffe busied himself with laying out a town and selling lots for a town he called Providence. Most people called it Fairfax Court House, however, and the name would be officially changed in 1874 to the Town of Fairfax. Despite Ratcliffe’s efforts the town was still little more than a collection of houses scattered around that courthouse when the Civil War arrived in the 1860s. Skirmishing in the streets of Fairfax resulted in the first Confederate battle casualty seven weeks before the first major battle of the conflict, the First Battle of Manassas.
Through the early 20th century, the Town of Fairfax remained a community of farms and small estates, with a tiny core of commerce, government and society in the few blocks surrounding the courthouse. In recent times Fairfax has grown to over six square miles but our explorations will concentrate on that historic core and we will begin with a building that was long the center of that core, next to which is a conveniently located parking lot...
With its advantageous location at the head of navigation on the Rappahannock River and surrounded by prosperous wheat and tobacco plantations, Fredericksburg boasted an impressive roster of early American luminaries. George Washington’s sister and mother lived here, James Monroe practiced law here, and naval hero John Paul Jones owned his only home here.
Fredericksburg was incorporated as a town in 1781 and prospered steadily as a transportation center, first on the river, then with great canvas-covered wagons and finally with a railroad in 1837. Its geography would shape its fate with the outbreak of the Civil War as the town lies midway between the Confederate capital in Richmond and the federal capital in Washington, D.C.
On December 13, 1862, the Federals stormed Robert E. Lee’s entrenchments in their first attempt to control this critical crossroads. The Union was turned away in such gruesome fighting that Lee was moved to remark, “It is well that war is so terrible; else we should grow too fond of it.” The slaughter of Armbrose Burnside’s troops was Lee’s most one-sided victory of the war. By May of 1863, this area had seen the most intense fighting ever staged on the North American continent.
After the war, Fredericksburg regained its position as a local trade hub and settled into its position as a residential enclave. In the 21st century the many make the daily commute to Richmond or Washington and more than a million people visit each year to investigate the Civil War heritage and explore forty downtown blocks that have been set aside as an historic district.
Our explorations will begin on ground that once held the bones of Fredericksburg’s pioneers but today is populated by brick walkways and benches and a fountain...
Front Royal developed along three major travel routes that intersected her. Today’s Chester Street was the main route from Chester’s Gap in the Blue Ridge to Thomas Chester’s ferry that crossed the Shenandoah River near present day Riverton, north of Front Royal. The road continued northwest of the ferry crossing, until it reached Winchester, the valley’s main trade center. Today’s South Royal Avenue follows the age-old path along the eastern shore of the South Fork of the Shenandoah River before crossing both branches of the Shenandoah River and linking with the Valley’s foremost travel route, the Great Wagon Road. Today’s East Main Street connected the other two routes with Rappahanncock County and the population and trade centers in central Virginia.
Industrious settlers and hard-working teamsters were not the only ones plying pre-Revolutionary War roads, however. Enough shady characters, rough-hewn mountaineers and unsavory river travelers congregated here that it was commonly known as “Helltown.” In 1788 the frontier settlement was incorporated as Front Royal, although the murky origins of the name are lost to history.
Industry came to the town in the 1820s when Joseph Tuley put a tannery into operation. The next decade when Warren County was carved out of the political landscape, Front Royal was chosen as the seat of government. With its blend of small industry and civic duties Front Royal was better able to withstand the ravages of the Civil War than some of its plantation-based neighbors. In fact, by 1880, Front Royal’s population doubled from 1870. The town’s economy ticked along with breweries, flour milling, small manufacturing and other goods and services. Into the 20th century just as the Great Depression was suffocating the country, Shenandoah National Park and Skyline Drive were opening in Front Royal’s backyard. It’s position at Mile Marker 0.6 has brought the town full circle back to its influential position on a major travel route.
The Front Royal Historic District comprises 170 acres that blanket the commercial core of the town and, appropriately, we will begin our walking tour at the downtown remnant of Front Royal’s transportation past...
Thomas Harrison staked his claim in the Shenandoah Valley in 1737 near where two traditional paths - the Indian Road and the Spotswood Trail - crossed. For the next forty years Harrison worked to expand his holdings in the valley and improve his estate. It wasn’t until the Commonwealth of Virginia officially organized Rockingham County in 1778 that Harrison acted to develop his land as a town. He gave the new government two and a half-acres in 1779 for a courthouse and 50 more the next year as Harrisonburg was designated the county seat of Rockingham.
Harrison’s sons continued to provide land and fuel the growth of the new town that became the economic and cultural hub of the valley. By 1850 Rockingham County was the largest producer of wheat and hay in the Commonwealth and most of that crop was processed and transported through Harrisonburg. Population was north of 1,000 making the town a metropolis in the county at that time.
If Harrisonburg was on Facebook during the Civil War it would have listed its relationship withe the Confederacy as “complicated.” The town’s representatives in Richmond had opposed secession and some of its leading citizens supported the Union. Early in the war General Thomas “Stonewall Jackson” passed through hauling Union railroad equipment that included an entire steam locomotive, that his troops had appropriated in a raid at Harpers Ferry. Later Philip Sheridan marched his Union troops down the Valley Road through town. It wasn’t like Winchester to the north that changed hands 72 times during the fighting but the prospect that the departing side might someday return may have helped limit damage in town.
Harrisonburg has always been an enthusiastic participant in urban renewal - even before there was such a term. After a devastating Christmas day fire in 1870 the town rebuilt with many impressive Victorian structures. Shelf life on these buildings was scarcely 25 years - many, including a handsome new courthouse were replaced before the new century. The urban renewal movement of the 1960s and 1970s was more insidious - weary buildings were just as often replaced by parking lots as newer models. Visitors who stayed in fine Harrisonburg hotels at the turn of the 20th century would find none if they returned at the turn of the 21st century.
But some intriguing survivors remain and our walking tour of downtown Harrisonburg to find them will begin on that original patch of land given by Thomas Harrison more than 230 years ago to start a town...
Leesburg has always been a crossroads town; today it is US Highway 15 running north-south and Virginia Highway 7 running east-west. In Colonial times those routes were known as the Carolina Road and the Potomac Ridge Road. In 1757 the Virginia Assembly designated the small settlement at the crossroads for the seat of its new Loudoun County. The land at that time was owned by Nicholas Minor and he knew how to take advantage of his political windfall. He had his 60 acres platted into 70 lots which he began selling for ｣3 with the provision that a brick, stone or wood house be constructed within three years or the property would revert back to Minor. Thus was a town built.
Minor called his utopia George Town but the King’s name was jettisoned the following year in favor of the Lee family, whose members Philip Ludwell Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee were town trustees responsible for regulating building in the town. By the time of the Revolution had grown to nearly 500 residents. In addition to court business, Leesburg developed into a market town for farmers looking to move goods out of the Shenandoah Valley. The opening of the Leesburg Turnpike in 1820 accelerated that trade.
Leesburg was visited early by the Civil War when on October 21, 1861, a Union force of 1,000 crossed the Potomac River at Ball’s Bluff and met one of the North’s first disasters of the conflict. Oregon senator Edward Baker, a close personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, led his command foolishly under the bluffs controlled by Confederate troops. Rifle fire from above killed Baker and half his force, many of whom were trapped between rifle fire and unscalable cliffs. Others drowned and their bodies floated down the river to Washington. Union prisoners were held on the courthouse lawn, and wounded from both sides were placed in homes and public buildings. The Battle of Ball’s Bluff was the largest battle of the war fought in Loudoun County but settled nothing. By war’s end, Leesburg changed hands about 150 times over the course of the war.
After the war Leesburg’s proximity to Washington and northern markets enabled it to find its antebellum prosperity with alacrity. Farmers were soon moving corn and milk and beef on the railroad that resumed operation in 1867. Soon that railroad was running commuter trains to Washington and in 1920 the electric express Washington-Leesburg Limited clicked along between the towns at a remarkable 26 mph.
With Leesburg’s suburban expansion gobbling up land in the mid-20th century the Town Council established the Old and Historic District in 1963, only the fifth such district to be created in Virginia (after Alexandria, Richmond, Charlottesville, and Williamsburg). Our explorations will follow the brick sidewalks of the historic district and we’ll begin on the outskirts of town where one of Leesburg’s most famous native sons in honored...
Migrants, mostly Germans and Scotch-Irish from Pennsylvania began following a time-etched Indian path known as the Great Wagon Road into the Shenandoah Valley in the 1730s. In 1778 the Virginia Legislature was ready to carve out a new county here which they named Rockbridge for a 90-foot natural bridge of stone that spanned a 215-foot gorge cut by Cedar Creek. The owner at the time was Thomas Jefferson, who acquired 157 acres on the creek for 20 shillings. At the same time a county seat was designated on land donated by Isaac Campbell where his family operated a ford where the Great Wagon Road crossed the North River. It was named Lexington after the Massachusetts town that had helped spark the American Revolution three years before.
Much of the early business of the town was courthouse-related, conducted from mostly log buildings that were erected around the grid pattern that was created to form four interior blocks. Most of those logs burned in a fire that destroyed the town in 1796. Lexington quickly rebuilt from the proceeds of a lottery. Also rebuilding a small struggling 50-year old school started by Presbyterians in 1749. The funds for the school’s salvation came from President George Washington himself and Lexington’s future course as a college town was set. For more than 200 years the main industry of Lexington has been education; first with Washington and Lee University and then Virginia Miltiary Institute.
Lexington largely escaped the ravages of the Civil War, although Union troops burned buildings during a brief occupation in retaliation for VMI’s role in the Battle of New Market. The first steam engine belching smoke arrived from Richmond in 1881 and led to a concentrated area of small manufacturing and commerce in town. Today Lexington holds sway as the cultural hub of Rockbridge County.
Our explorations will touch on three historic districts stuffed into a compact geographic area: downtown, Washington and Lee and Virginia Military Institute. And we will begin in a small greenspace that pre-dates them all...
John Lynch, who was only 17 at that time, established a ferry at a difficult ford in the James River in 1757. Over the years dwellings sprung up on the navigable river near his ferry house. Lynch expanded his enterprises himself in the 1780s when he constructed a tobacco warehouse on his land north of the river. In 1784 the ambitious Lynch petitioned the Virginia General Assembly to authorize a town charter for his little fiefdom. In 1786 his request was granted to establish “a town on the lands of Lynch in the County Campbell.”
The new town was raised on tobacco, a variation known as dark leaf tobacco suited for chewing and rolling cigars. Hiogsheads of tobacco from the surrounding farms arrived at the James River and were poled down to Richmond in flat bateaux boats. By the time John Lynch died in 1820 at the age of 80 the town that developed on the hills surrounding his old ferry was well on its way to being the industrial star of southwestern Virginia. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Lynchburg is perhaps the most rising place in the U.S.... It ranks now next to Richmond in importance...” In the years before the Civil War Lynchburg was among the richest towns per capita in the country.
Tobacco also kickstarted the Lynchburg economic engine following the Civil War. In 1882 Lynchburg native revolutionized the tobacco industry by inventing a cigarette rolling machine. Within five years more than 30,000,000 pounds of tobacco were marketed from Lynchburg. The foundation laid by tobacco led to a thriving trade in iron and steel. Its shoe factories were among the busiest in America. For a time the world’s largest tannin extract plant operated here.
The 1880s to 1930s brought Lynchburg’s greatest prosperity and the downtown area retains a wealth of commercial buildings from this era that we will see on our walking tour but first we will begin where the town began, at the site of John Lynch’s ferry...
The Manassas Gap and the Orange and Alexandria railroads crossed in Manassas, a surveyor’s decision in the 1850s that transformed this small farming community into one of America’s best known towns in the Civil War. In an attempt to control that railroad junction the Northern and Southern armies clashed twice in the first two years of the war five miles north of town near a creek called Bull Run, resulting in 30,000 casualties.
On July 21, 1861, the Civil War was expected to end. The fully equipped Union army under General Irvin McDowell was prepared to take the field for the first time at Bull Run. The complete submission of the rebels was considered such a certainty that the Federal troops were accompanied by picnickers and sightseers. After ten hours of bloody fighting, the Union army was in retreat and it was apparent this was not going to be a one-battle war.
The armies returned to Bull Run a year later, seasoned and spirited. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was at the peak of its power, and he out maneuvered General John Pope’s Union army in three days of struggle beginning on August 28. With his masterful victory here, Lee was able to carry the war tot he North for the first time.
During the Civil War, both sides used the fledgling town as a supply base and twice Manassas was ravaged. Rebuilt after the hostilities ended, the town grew during the Victorian era of the 1880s and 1890s and became the Prince William County seat in 1892. A devastating fire swept through the commercial district in 1905 with only two brick buildings surviving the conflagration. Thereafter Manassas remained a small town for most of the 20th century. It became a city in 1975. Known for its Civil War history, Manassas trumpets its Old Town historic district.
Our explorations of the early 20th century Manassas streetscape will begin at the landmark that defines the town, a splendid relic from the golden age of railroading...
Few American cities have been as repeatedly shaped by war as Norfolk.
During the American Revolution the town, that had been incorporated in 1705 and granted a Royal charter as a borough in 1736, was a Loyalist stronghold mostly concerned with keeping its trade routes to England filled. This didn’t prevent the British from shelling the city in 1776. When eight hours of bombing ended almost two-thirds of the city was in flames. Local patriots destroyed the remaining buildings for strategic reasons.
British warships returned in the War of 1812 and again attacked the bustling port that had rebuilt in the previous 30 years. This time batteries at Fort Norfolk and Fort Nelson repulsed the invaders. Half a century later the War between the States brought a new series of disasters. After Virginia departed the Union, departing Federal troops burned the navy yard in Portsmouth. The ironclad CSS Virginia gained the Confederacy’s greatest naval victory when it sank the USS Cumberland and Congress on March 8, 1862, in Hampton Roads. When the Virginia set sail the next morning it was with the full expectation of finishing the destruction of the wooden Union fleet. Instead, it met the USS Monitor, another ironclad. People gathered on shore to watch the battle that would forever change naval warfare. After three hours, the Virginia retired, the battle a draw. Two months later, in May 1862, Mayor William Lamb surrendered Norfolk to General John E. Wood and Union forces. The city would remain under martial law for the duration of the war.
In 1907 the city staged the 300th birthday of the founding of Jamestown and during the exposition high-ranking naval officers agreed that the site was ideal for a permanent naval base. During World War I there were 34,000 enlisted men on the base. Eventually Naval Station Norfolk became the largest naval base in the world. The military remains the largest employer in Virginia’s second-largest city (behind neighboring Virginia Beach).
As a nod to the entwinement of the city’s fortunes with its military past our walking tour willbegin at a monument to Norfolk’s brief stay in the Confederate States of America...
There was a trading post on this spot at the head of navigation on the Appomattox River before 1850. When Peter Jones became proprietor the small settlement became known as Peter’s Point. Petersburg was granted a charter in 1748 and by the time of the American Revolution the town was important enough to be raided by British forces under the direction of turncoat Benedict Arnold.
In the early 1800s Petersburg was the rival and even the superior to its neighbor to the north, Richmond. Crippling fires in 1815 and 1826 impeded progress but in 1850, when the town was consolidated with the nearby settlements of Blandford, Pocahontas, and Ravenscroft to become a city it was the third largest in Virginia with a population of 14,010.
During the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant based his assault on the Confederate capital in Richmond on severing the supply line from the south at Petersburg. In June of 1864 the city became the “last ditch of the Confederacy.” Four days of sharp fighting pushed the Southern lines back one mile, where both armies entrenched. The longest siege ever to take place on American soil was about to begin.
Almost immediately the 48th Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers, comprised mostly of coal miners, began digging a 511-foot mine shaft into the Confederate line, quietly carrying out tons of soil in cracker boxes. On July 30, after a month of digging, the Federals exploded four tons of powder under the Confederate battery, blowing 278 Southern defenders into the air. In the confusion that followed, the Union troops storming the line plunged directly into the massive crater created by the explosion rather than advancing around it. The Confederates were able to seal their defensive line and inflicted horrible casualties in a determined counterattack. The siege was to last nine months. Before it ended on April 2, 1865, a total of 42,000 Union and 28,000 Confederate troops were killed or captured in the Petersburg campaign.
The city began anew almost immediately after the war ended. The port of Petersburg was a commercial center and the city evolved into an important railroad hub as well. Census reports in 1880 indicated there were 70 more businesses operating in Petersburg than there were twenty years earlier when the Civil War began. Most found work in the tobacco factories but there was peanut processing and flour mills a silk mill, pencil plants and furniture-building as well.
Our walking tour will start where Peter Jones managed the loading and unloading of packets 350 years ago and continue up the hill to the historic Courthouse District...
After a series of Indian attacks in the 1670s planters and settlers led by 29-year old Nathaniel Bacon rose up against Virginia Colonial Governor William Berkeley for his refusal to retaliate. Bacon’s Rebellion was eventually squashed. Property of the participants was seized by the Crown and 20 conspirators hanged. Among them was Captain William Carver who owned a plantation along the brackish waters of the Elizabeth River. Carver’s confiscated land was granted in 1716 to Colonel William Crawford who in 1750 “laid out a parcel of land into one hundred and twenty-two lots, commodious streets, places for a courthouse, market and public landings. He named the place Portsmouth and presented it to Norfolk County.
Portsmouth has a long history as a port town. Scotsman Andrew Sprowle founded the Gosport Shipyard adjacent to Portsmouth in 1767. The British government, recognizing the value of the enterprise, soon took over the yard as a repair station and appointed Sprowle as navy agent. The yard, renamed the Norfolk Naval Shipyard after the Civil War, would grow into one of the world’s largest and dominate the economy of the city. During World War II, more than 40,000 workers were employed in the shipyard.
Today Portsmouth boasts the largest concentration of antique houses between Alexandria and Charleston, South Carolina but before we delve into the square mile that has come to be known as the Olde Towne Historic District we will start at that famous shipyard...
Advantageously situated at the head of navigation on the James River, Richmond has been a serial capital city through the centuries. When this was the land of the Powhatan tribe it was one of their capitals, often called Shocquohocan, or Shockoe. The English began attempts at a settlement here as early as 1609 but development did not take until 1645 when Fort Charles was erected at the falls of the James. On October 27, 1673 Englishman William Byrd was granted 1,200 acres on the James River and became a prosperous fur trader on the land that would become modern-day Richmond.
In 1779 the capital of Virginia was moved out of Williamsburg to Richmond, following the flow of western-bound settlers to a more centralized location. At the time there were only 684 people living in the town and Governor Thomas Jefferson and the government had to scramble for rented and temporary quarters. Virginians embraced their new capital, however, and by 1790 the population had swelled to 3,761 and by 1800 had reached 5,730.
Richmond soon blossomed as the leading industrial center of the American South. The furnaces of the Tredegar Iron Works and Belle Isle Iron Works were stocked in 1833 and soon became the largest manufacturing site outside of the industrial North. Richmond flour mills also knew no equal and its factories hummed turning out paper and cigars and fertilizer. The city was a major transportation center and was the site of the world’s first triple railroad crossing.
Richmond became a capital city once again when the Confederate government moved here from Montgomery, Alabama in the early days of the Civil War in 1861, chiefly to be close to the crucial munitions coming out of the Tredegar Iron Works. It immediately became the focus of Abraham Lincoln’s Army of the Potomac and the first major campaign against Richmond took place in June of 1862. Union General George McClellan failedduring the Seven Days Battles and it would not be for another three years that the capital city and the Confederacy would fall. On April 3, 1865, Richmond was evacuated and burned by its own people. It is estimated that one in every four Richmond buildings was destroyed in the blaze.
Richmond weathered the Reconstruction Era better than most and was soon the most densely populated city in the South. The world’s first cigarette-rolling machine was introduced in the city at that time and the world’s first successful electric street car system appeared on its streets. But like all American cities, Richmond’s manufacturing presence waned through the 20th century and today its economic engine is powered by law, finance, government and as a popular location for corporate headquarters.
Our walking tour will concentrate on the downtown area where Richmond’s historic warehouse district is located on the banks of the James River and where the city’s “Wall Street” can be found. But we will begin on the top of a hill where Thomas Jefferson once stood and sketched out the future home of the government that defines Richmond...
German and Scotch-Irish settlers pushed down into the Roanoke Valley from Pennsylvania in the early 1740s and by 1746 this area carried the name “Big Lick.” It came by its name honestly as the marshy conditions of the salt lick and the lack of a dependable supply of fresh water inhibited attempts to establish towns. Only the town of Salem would establish a lasting foothold.
In 1838 enough homesteaders had arrived to warrant the creation of Roanoke County. A few years earlier William Rowland had purchased land in what would one day be downtown Roanoke and laid out building lots. The town was chartered as Gainesborough, taking its name from Rowland’s partner, Kemp Gaines. The development did not, however cause a growth explosion - tax rolls listed four buildings in Gainesborough and six next door in Big Lick.
The railroad arrived in 1852 and the town began to stir, although progress was temporarily impeded by the Civil War. Big Lick was chartered as a town in 1874 as the population reached 600. In 1881, however, the Shenandoah Valley Railroad that ran north-south from Hagerstown, Maryland merged with the Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio Railroad whose lines ran east-west. After an inducement of $10,000 and other concessions, Big Lick was chosen as the intersection and headquarters for the newly named Norfolk & Western Railway Company. Big Licksters immediately offered to rename their town after railroad president Frederick J. Kimball but he demurred in favor of “Roanoke,” an Indian term roughly translating to “shell money.”
The town was launched on a decades-long boom that established it as the dominant city in southwest Virginia. The railroad and its great maintenance shops would drive Roanoke for much of the next 75 years. Steam engines continued to roll off its tracks until 1953. Other industries, including enormous cellulose factories followed, pushing the population of the city proper to 100,000 with three times as many people in the surrounding area.
As befits its legacy as a railroad town, we’ll start our walking tour hard by the historic tracks in the plaza at the intersection of Norfolk Avenue and Market Street and begin by looking across to a relic that dates back to the very earliest days of train travel in Roanoke...
John Lewis brought his family to this spot in the Shenandoah Valley as the pioneering settlers in the year of Washington’s birth - 1732. A few years later William Beverley, a wealthy planter and merchant, won a grant of 118,000 acres here “in consideration for inducing a large number of settlers to the community.” The town was laid out in 1747 and took the name of Lady Rebecca Staunton Gooch, wife to Royal Lieutenant-Governor Sir William Gooch. Thanks to its central location the settlement attracted the government and the with the westernmost courthouse in British North America prior to the Revolution was constructed here. It was no small thing - Augusta County in the 1700s extended (theoretically) as far west as the Mississippi River. In 1801 when Staunton was incorporated as a town the population totaled 800.
Staunton grew as a market town for the fertile Shenandoah Valley and small industries churning out carriages and boots and blankets followed. The Virginia Central Railroad arrived in 1854 and during the Civil War the town served as an important supply depot for the Confederacy. Union troops arrived in 1864 and destroyed the railroad station and Staunton’s manufacturing capacity but spared much of the town.
The post-war years saw Staunton embark on an economic and building boom. In 1908 it became the first city in America to adopt a city manager form of government based on the corporate form of organization. The elected council appoints a city manager who administers municipal affairs.
The urban renewal fever sweeping America in the 1960s struck Staunton and more than 30 downtown buildings fell before a wrecking ball, igniting the creation of the Historic Staunton Foundation to help preserve much of the streetscape seen today. Much of that streetscape is the vision of one man - Thomas J. Collins, an architect responsible for over 200 buildings in the Staunton area. The nimble Collins worked in many styles we will encounter on our walking tour and we will begin with one of his creations for the railroad that primed the pump for Staunton’s growth...
Today nearly every schoolchild knows the town of Williamsburg. That that is the case is due not so much to the great history that happened here but to the vision of one man - William Archer Rutherford Goodwin.
To be sure, Williamsburg, which served as capital of Virginia from 1699 to 1780, saw its share of notable events, most significantly the fiery rhetoric in the Virginia Capitol by Patrick Henry and brush-ups during the Revolutionary War and Civil War. But after the capital shuffled off to Richmond in 1780 the town led a mostly somnambulant existence for a century and a half.
William Goodwin, then 33 years of age, arrived in Williamsburg in 1903 to become pastor of the Bruton Parish Church. Goodwin was struck by the number of still-standing 18th century buildings in his new community and was inspired to restore his church in time for the 300th anniversary of the establishment of the Episcopal Church in America at Jamestown in 1907.
And then Goodwin left to minister to a church in Rochester, New York.
He returned to Bruton Parish in 1923 and was dismayed at the changes that had occurred to Williamsburg in his absence - the deterioration and loss of the antique buildings was rampant. In his mind Dr. Goodwin hatched a scheme not just to save and restore a building here and there but to bring its 18th century appearance back to Williamsburg. He found perhaps the best ally in the country to pull off such an audacious plan - John D. Rockefeller, Jr., son of the founder of Standard Oil. With the Rockefeller money they founded Colonial Williamsburg and created a 301-acre Historic Area. Some 459 buildings were torn down, 91 of the Colonial period rebuilt, 67 restored and a new shopping center in Colonial style was provided.
Today, Colonial Williamsburg is Virginia’s largest tourist attraction and we will begin right at its center, on a green space that was framed by catalpa trees where Americans first enjoyed stage plays, an area whose restoration was targeted as one of Colonial Williamsburg’s first restorations...
Near the northern entrance to the Shenandoah Valley and sited at the crossroads of two historic foot trails, Winchester is the oldest Virginia city west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Germans migrating from Pennsylvania did most of the heavy lifting in settling the region in the 1730s but the land belonged to the English lord, Thomas 6th Baron Fairfax of Cameron, part of his proprietary inheritance. In 1749 Lord Fairfax settled in the area that was called Frederick Town after Frederick, father of George III of England. To help figure out just what he had with his Virginia lands one of the surveyors that was hired was an eager red-headed lad by the name of George Washington, enthusiastically digging into his first paid job. Washington would build Fort Loudoun here during the French and Indian War and, at twenty-six, was elected to his first public office as the county’s representative to the House of Burgesses.
The town’s named was switched to Winchester, honoring an ancient English capital, in 1752. It boasted a population approaching 1,000 and was the trade center of the valley on the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania to the southwest. There were many roads leading to ports where goods could be shipped to and from England. In the days after the Revolutionary War, Winchester led a charge to prosperity in America’s developing western lands. At one point merchants petitioned the Virginia assembly to build more roads and ferry boats, citing delays up to three days for freight wagons to get across the Shenandoah River.
By the mid 19th-century Winchester was a major supply route; the town lay on the Valley pike and was served by east-west and north-south railroads and the Potomac river. Not surprisingly, from the spring of 1862 until the fall of 1864 Winchester changed flags some 70 times. Four major engagements were fought in and around town. No traces of these battles, which helped drain Union resources away from a march on Richmond, remain.
Although more than 200 homes and buildings were destroyed during the fighting, Winchester shook off the ravages of the Civil War quicker than most Southern towns - mostly on the back of the apple. Winesaps, Pippins, Staymans, the Delicious, Black Twigs and, especially, York Imperials overflowed in some of the world’s largest packing houses. the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival began in the spring of 1924 to encourage folks to admire the hundreds of thousands of apple trees coming into bloom each year.
Our walking tour will visit a bit of Colonial history, a bit of Revolutionary War history, a bit of Civil War history and even touch on a bit of apple history and we’ll begin in the traditional center of town where folks used to gather for everything from a public hanging to Christmas caroling...