WILLIAM BYRD'S EARLY SETTLEMENT AT SHOCKOES

Overlays showing the routes, growth, form and principal public buildings of
eighteenth-century RIchmond [Richard Worsham]. The area of the settlement of
Shockoes is shown at the center. 

The town of Richmond was preceded by the active, unincorporated merchant settlement known as Shockoes. This community grew with the start of the seemingly endless flow of tobacco streaming down the river from the newly settled farms of the Piedmont, beginning in the 1730s. By examining early maps, this unplanned, oldest section of the city can be distinguished from the regular grid of streets and lots that covered most of the city area. While the area west of Shockoe Creek was covered by a grid in 1768, the previously occupied land near the principal boat landing is characterized by irregular sections of lots of varying sizes and by larger tenements that correspond to topographic features. 

Byrd leased tracts or “tenements” to merchants who wanted a share of the lucrative trade at the falls.  Eventually, the informally organized community consisted of a double row of lots just behind the “Rock Landing” and a group of irregularly shaped tenements clustered around it to the north and west. All the lots and larger tracts were probably leased from Byrd, with the leases likely filed among the lost records of Williamsburg’s General Court. 

Early falls area resident William Byrd I (1652-1704) was an experienced trader and explorer in the lands to the west. He and Nathaniel Bacon were licensed to deal in the burgeoning Indian trade in 1675 from what would become Richmond, but restriction of trade and traffic beyond the frontiers to Fort Henry (later Petersburg), where the principal trading paths converged on the falls of the Appomattox River, cut off trade from the James. Most of Byrd’s attention extended to the broad acreage on the south side of the river that he had inherited from his uncle, Thomas Stegge. Stegge, son of an English merchant, is thought to have lived in the stone house at the falls shown in William Byrd’s Title Book. When he invited Byrd to join him and inherit his 1,800 acres at the falls in 1671, Byrd likely settled in this house in present-day Manchester.  In 1677, after Bacon’s Rebellion, Byrd commanded defense forces at the falls. In 1688, the elder Byrd moved his base of operations to his newly purchased plantation at Westover, halfway between the falls and the center of government at Jamestown.

William Byrd II (1674-1744) established a plantation called Shockoes on the north side of the river across from his principal establishment at the Falls Plantation. It was on the same site as an Indian settlement that is shown of a plat of 1663.

Detail of “Plan of 800 Acres of Land near Shaccoe Creek” (c.1663)

 Note identification of creek: “Shaccoe Creek formerly Called Chyinek.”

 From Byrd Title Book (Virginia Historical Society).

Its first mention is as a tobacco plantation is in 1709 in Byrd's earliest surviving diary from 1709. The location of the tobacco fields is unknown, but they may well have been placed on the terrace along the river south of Shockoe Creek where Byrd would lay out the town of Richmond in 1737. There was only one public building at Shockoes, the Falls Chapel, which was built by the established church on the north side of the river before 1735. 

In spite of modern historical opinion, there is no evidence of William Byrd II conducting trade with Indian tribes to the west from the falls of the James. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, Byrd’s diary entries show that his principal store and the bulk of his trade in furs and tobacco were based to the south on the Appomattox River. By 1712, however, the pace of agricultural and commercial operations had stepped up at Shockoes. Byrd spent a night at Shockoes that year; it was the first time he had done so during the years covered by the diary. He observed that Allen Bailey “had almost finished the storehouse there. I had not seen this place since the house was built and hardly knew it again. It was very pretty” [Secret Diary of William Byrd. 14 February 1712]. 

The storehouse at the falls was probably a forerunner of a successful store mentioned by Byrd in a diary entry during 1741, indicating that it already served as a supply depot for the surrounding countryside.  Byrd opened a tobacco warehouse at Shockoes in 1730, immediately after a series of such warehouses was authorized across the colony by the Tobacco Inspection Act. Tobacco had begun to pour down the James River as settlement expanded into the Piedmont. When Byrd advertised his new town of Richmond in the Virginia Gazette he mentioned the “public warehouse at Shockoes." 

With the opening of the official tobacco warehouse near the “Rock Landing,” where sloops and small boats could take on and discharge cargo, the tiny settlement would have taken on additional significance. Shockoes was, however, no match for the trade downriver at Bermuda Hundred and Warwick, where larger seagoing vessels took on cargo. The population was undoubtedly very small even into the 1750s. 

Early settlers found the area along the upper James River good for farming, hunting, and grazing. They claimed land, had it surveyed, and started farming. They reproduced institutions with which they were familiar, including the established church, the county government system, and the use of enslaved workers to exploit the rich soil.  By the 1720s, prominent members of planter families like the Cockes, Randolphs and Bollings selected large tracts along the river west of Richmond. As lands were claimed and plantations established in the 1730s and 40s, the reach of slavery rapidly expanded westward from Tidewater Virginia into the Piedmont. Gangs of slaves labored from sunup to sundown planting, tending and harvesting tobacco under the charge of an overseer. They were sent into the upcountry regions to open land for tobacco farming on remote “quarters” which contributed to the plantation owner’s overall production. 

From its opening to settlement in the 1720s until well after the American Revolution, the Piedmont region of Virginia contributed enormously to the colony’s tobacco-based economy. Twenty to thirty million pounds of this labor-intensive crop, as much as one fourth of the entire production of North American tobacco, was produced on the waters of the Middle James. Much of this crop moved through the warehouses and port of Richmond.  

Trade along the upper section of the river was brisk from the 1730s, but, until the river was improved with sluices and wing dams in 1774,  the trip was risky and difficult and could only be undertaken during seasons of high water. Planters used double log canoes to bring hogsheads of tobacco to Richmond. The hogshead were unloaded west of the falls at Westham and rolled along the Westham Road- a narrow route roughly equivalent to Cary Street and Park Avenue- and down the curving final segment that parallels todays Governor Street to the wooden tobacco warehouses beside the Rock Landing, the uppermost place accessible by water on the river. 

View of the city in c 1805, with the house probably built by Philip Watson (the Council Chamber)  shown by
 itself at the top of Council Chamber Hill at center right, and the original location of Shockoes at the lower
 center and center right [Detail, James Madison, Map of Virginia, 1818 (original 1807]. Mayo’s Bridge is just
 visible at the far left.

Detail of the c 1768 plat of the town of Shockoes (part of Byrd’s lottery), after it had been
 incorporated in the larger town of Richmond, copy of c 1780 among Jefferson’s papers. 
The map lists James Buchanan, Thomas Younghusband, Patrick Coutts, James
 McDowell, and Philip Watson as holders of the large irregular tenements, which probably
 included pastures or gardens for their use. The merchants would have lived at their
 places of business, although Philip Watson lived, by 1757, in an expensive, well-furnished
four-room brick house on the top of the hill overlooking the settlement.

The form of the first, low-lying settlement can be excavated from the maps of c. 1768 and 1809. It consists the two rows of lots just north of the Rock Landing. The first row of lots, including the “Ferry Lot” faces the landing. The settlement is divided into four irregular quadrants by a pair of narrow crossed streets next to the landing. Byrd’s Warehouse was in the northwest quadrant, flanked on each side by one-acre lots, later subdivided. The warehouse faced the “county road” from the south. Shockoe Warehouse was located in the south quadrant blocking what was to become the path of the approach to Mayo’s Bridge in 1788. Deed references in later years indicate that the names and numbers attached to western lots on Young’s Map of 1809 and Jefferson’s tracing of c 1780 were used as identifiers on the now-missing 1768 map of the town lots on Shockoe Hill. These names do not necessarily represent recent or current owners or functions of those tracts in either 1780 or 1809, but rather the conditions in 1768.  

Detail of the 1804 James Map of Richmond. This set shows the cross-shaped lanes that give structure to the
lots at the Rock Landing. The lots were numbered in sequence with the larger Town of Shockoe in 1768
 [Library of Virginia].

It seems likely that the central lane that divided the two ranks of lots was the route of the ancient path (the Three-Chop’t Road”) that led from Tidewater. It crossed the creek by means of a ford and angled up the slope by a series of curves corresponding to modern-day Fourteenth and Governor streets. The cross-street later known as 15th Street may have been the original route to and from the landing. 

Later, when John Mayo put in his bridge (1788), its approach corresponded to part of the old road and then continued at an angle through the site of the original Shockoe Warehouse, accounting for the angle of Fourteenth Street leading to the bridge. This “common formerly used as a public road from Shockoe Warehouse to the wharf” now claimed by John Mayo was mentioned in a later deed. 

Scottish merchant James Buchanan acquired the tract “denominated Shockoe Warehouse” (identified as lot 330 on the Byrd Lottery Map) from William Byrd’s lottery in 1768 [Richmond DB 9:164, 1814]. Both the Shockoe Warehouse and Byrd’s Warehouse were relocated to sites outside the regular settlement as it continued to expand. Both the new (to the north and west) and old (lots 328 and 337/340) locations of both warehouses are shown on the map of 1809. Byrd’s Warehouse moved to an odd-shaped lot on the southwest side of Fourteenth and Franklin, part of Buchanan’s Tenement. The Shockoe Warehouse moved onto the low bluff just above its former location, where it was convenient to the traffic coming down the hill on Governor Street and to the Canal Basin, an area now known as Shockoe Slip. 

Young’s Map of 1809, showing the lot lines of the settlement of Shockoes at the Rock
 Landing next to the mouth of Shockoe Creek. The curving road shown dotted in at the
 upper left is the “county road” that climbed the hill. The bridge at the center left is where
 the main road crossed the creek.

A portion of Lot 335 on Young's 1817 map facing “the public road from Shockoe
 Warehouse to the wharf” was sold by Thomas Jefferson in 1811. Since the deed, no
 longer extant, was recorded in Williamsburg at the General Court, it is likely that he had
 acquired it before 1780 (mentioned in Richmond Deed Book 9:394).

While the early plantation buildings mentioned by Byrd at Shockoes- a storehouse and overseer’s dwelling, not to mention slave housing- may have been located near the cultivated land, the tobacco warehouses and store were positioned as close to the “Rock Landing” as possible, where tobacco could be rolled down the bluff from the upcountry. Those merchants, traders, and mechanics who populated the settlement organized themselves around the route and the landing on spontaneously arranged, irregular lots that responded directly to the traffic and geography. The tobacco warehouses, Shockoe Warehouse and Byrd’s Warehouse, formed the nucleus of the settlement (at Petersburg, the site of earliest warehouse became the city’s first public square).  Other warehouses undoubtedly existed at the time, including a public warehouse on Younghusband’s tenement in 1769.

Byrd appears to have preferred leasing tracts to merchants rather than selling outright. Such leaseholds, in the form of ground rent, were also used by a principal landowner at Petersburg. The numerous large, irregular “tenements” that are visible on the west side of Shockoe Creek on early maps are the remnants of these leaseholds.  Since the Byrds used the General Court in Williamsburg, whose deed books have been destroyed, to record leases and sales of land, the only record is from references contained in later Henrico County deeds. Enough of these exist to sketch out the pattern. A few leases from the mid-eighteenth century were recorded locally, such as the ten-year arrangement for a 128-acre tenement between Byrd and merchant Philip Watson, who appears to have renewed his long-standing lease in the 1750s.     

At first, Shockoes kept its character separate from the new development at Richmond, which was laid out in as much as defensive move by Byrd as an effort to generate income. Byrd had complained in 1727 that he would have to lose money by turning over 50 acres of his land at the tobacco inspection point to create a town, as a bill with that intention was threatened by the House of Burgesses. While he realized that he could profit from the sales, he was afraid that someone was pressing for the bill in order to set up a rival tobacco warehouse. 

Map of lots sold in the Lottery of 1767. The village of Shockoes is included within the "town land" shown on the map.

Most of the tenements were sold in 1767 as part of the lottery of the lands at the falls of William Byrd III (1728-1777). A new, official town of Shockoe was platted that encompassed much of today's downtown Richmond west of the creek. The Virginia Gazette of 9 Nov. 1769 announced that “On Friday the 22d day of December next, will be sold, on the premises, to the highest bidder, for ready money, The Lots in the town of Shockoe, at the falls of the James river, known by the name of Younghusband’s tenements, lately drawn by the subscriber in the Honourable Col. Byrd’s lottery. These lots consist of several acres of ground, very capable of being advantageously improved. There is at present on part of them a public warehouse, a large and commodious dwelling house, with other conveniences, well situated and adapted either for a merchant or public housekeeper” [Nat. Archives].

It isn’t possible to know how many merchants were at the falls at mid-century. A later tax list of 1782 gives some insight. The population at that time was made up of 27 principal families, headed by well-known merchants and state officials. John Harvey, state register; John McKeand, merchant; Charles Irvin, merchant; James Buchanan, James Hayes, printer; Foster Webb, treasurer; Alexander Nelson, merchant; Alex. Coulter, saddler; George Nicholson, merchant; William Pennock, merchant; James Curry, physician; William Hay, merchant; Benjamin Harrison, governor; Benjamin Harrison, merchant; Lerafino Formicola, tavern keeper; Stewart and Hopkins, merchants; Cox and Higgins, merchants; Richard Hogg, tavern keeper; William Younghusband, no occupation listed; James Anderson, smith; Henry Banks, merchant; Banks, Hunter, and Co., merchants; William Foushee, physician; James Ramsey, no occupation listed; James Hunter, merchant; and a number of persons for whom no occupation was listed. Only a few of the principal families had been there for more than three years. James Buchanan had been there for 25 years; James Currie, 12 years; John McKeand, 19 1/2 years; and William Flush, 5 years. Most had arrived with the state government.  Several merchants who had been there for years had died, including James McPherson, Thomas Younghusband, and Patrick Coutts [1782 Tax List, National Archives].   

At mid-century, the series of larger tenements, occupied by early merchants James McPherson, Patrick Coutts, David Ross, and James Buchanan, were ranged along the top of a steep bluff that prevented easy movement to the west, their shape dictated by the topography.  Additional tenements to the north lined the sloping western bank of Shockoe Creek, including Thomas Younghusband’s, McDowells, Williamson’s, and Watson’s. Younghusband’s was the site of  the tavern later known as the Bell Tavern (Jefferson enjoyed visiting “Mrs. Younghusband’s Tavern [John Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, ii]);. After 1737, most of these merchants also owned lots in the new town of RIchmond.   At the time of his death, James Buchanan (1737–1787) was called “the oldest merchant of this city” (Virginia Independent Chronicle [Richmond], 17 Oct. 1787). Scotsman John McKeand, merchant and cabinet maker, arrived in Virginia about 1750. He settled in Richmond in 1763 where he was a merchant and cabinet maker. As a merchant he became partners with another of the many Scottish factors that served the community as merchants, James Buchanan, who had arrived there in c 1757. They advertised in the Virginia Gazette in the late 1760s and 70s. In 1769, after Byrd had disposed of his plan, McKeand was able to purchase a half-acre lot between William Byrd’s Warehouse and his own property known as McKeand’s Tenement. 

A careful reading the complex, layout of lots in the area around Main Street Station reveals the organic form of the early eighteenth-century tobacco inspection port at the falls of the James River. While no buildings survive from the period, the streets and lot layout of the earliest European settlement at Richmond, now buried below yards of fill earth, can be deduced from current property lines and historic maps.

Richmond As Provincial Capital

Map of the Prize Lots in William Byrd's Lottery, 1768

When William Byrd III and the trustees responsible for liquidating his debts decided on a lottery to be held in 1768 as the best method to dispose of his land west of Shockoe Creek, they divided the land into plots of about 100 acres each, except for a tract immediately west of the creek which straddled the county road and was labelled "town land."



1768 plat of the Town of Shockoe as found among Jefferson's papers with undifferentiated grid pattern. The  pr-eexisting tenements and lots along Shockoe Creek are shown at the right.   

These 400 acres were also numbered and distributed as part of the lottery. As the Town of Shockoe, this area was incorporated into the town of Richmond by the General Assembly in 1769.  The relentless, undifferentiated, grid pattern of the new section continued the lines of the 1737 plan of Richmond and spread from the lowlands along the river up and over the knobs and ravines of Shockoe Hill. Its boundaries, as well as the boundaries of the many lots to the north and west, set the pattern of development that guided the city's growth from that time forward. Previous holdings, or "tenements," of irregular shape make up the previous settlement  of Shockoe's, the original settlement along the west side of the creek. These account for the irregularities of the street layout in the area between the towns of Richmond and Shockoe. The lots along  Main Street on the west side of Shockoe Creek became a popular location for businesses. While many lots undoubtedly sold on top of the hill, the upper section was slow to develop.

The act of 1779 which relocated the capital from Williamsburg to Richmond included a number of unusual directives. In it, and in the execution of the act that followed, the hand of Jefferson can be discerned planning, compromising, and revising a suitably urbane setting for the purposes of the new state government. In order to facilitate the transformation of the town of Richmond into the new state capital, the General Assembly appointed the Directors of Public Buildings. This board of five (later nine) members included Thomas Jefferson as an active member.

"That six whole squares of ground surrounded each of them by four streets, and containing all the ground within such streets, situate in the said town of Richmond, and on an open and airy part thereof, shall be appropriated to the use and purpose of public buildings. On one of the said squares shall be erected, one house for the use of the general assembly, to be called the capitol, which said capitol shall contain two apartments for the use of the senate and their clerk, two others for the us of the house of delegates and their clerk, and others for the purposes of conferences, committees and a lobby, of such forms and dimensions as shall be adopted to their respective purposes: On one other of the said squares shall be erected, another building to be called the halls of justice, which shall contain two apartments for the use of the court of appeals and its clerk, two others for the use of the high court of chancery and its clerk, two others for the use of the general court and its clerk, two others for the used of the admiralty court and its clerk, and others for the uses of grand and petty juries. . . .; and on the same square last mentioned shall be built a publick jail; one other of the said squares shall be reserved for the purpose of building thereon hereafter, a house for the several executive boards and offices to be held in: Two others with the intervening street, shall be reserved for the use of the governour of this commonwealth for the time being, and the remaining square shall be appropriated to the use of the publick market. The said houses shall be built in a handsome manner with walls of brick or stone, and porticoes where the same may be convenient or ornamental, with pillars and pavements of stone."

The squares referred to were six blocks of the existing or proposed town (amounting to twelve acres). The Directors of Public Building were to select the site, which could be in areas already platted or in a new section of two hundred lots “adjacent to such parts of said town as to them shall seem most convenient” (this refers to a section of lots on the north side of present-day Broad Street adjoining the Shockoe plat of 1768. The double measure of land (four acres) associated with the Governor’s House was required to provide domestic areas and for associated paddocks and gardens. The caveat “for the time being” may refer to the presence of a existing dwelling on the lots intended for the governor’s house, that was to be used as a “palace” until a new dwelling could be substituted, which would not occur until 1813. 

On closer examination, it appears that the series of public buildings, and the porticos of stone were intended to form some sort of architectural unity. Closer reading of the directions shown above suggests that the contiguous squares ("six whole squares of ground surrounded each of them by four streets, and containing all the ground within such streets") were intended to form one great square (forum).  The design likely included some sort of hierarchical relation between the buildings and functions, 

Urban historian John W. Reps points out that this is the first time in an American city that “the three major branches of government were given recognition in the physical plan of the city (Tidewater Towns, 927).” Craig A. Reynolds has observed that it was a radical step to call for a "multi-temple district" involving a "standardization" of public buildings. According to Reynolds, Jefferson was likely thinking, somewhat impractically, of the project for a reconstructed Roman forum shown in Palladio's Book Four. His copy described the forum as a central square or market surrounded by a two-tiered continuous portico giving access to bankers' offices, with a curia (senate ) and basilica (courthouse) on either side. Similarly, Livy described the forum as a central square combining commercial and governmental functions in Book I: he mentions a prison and senate house overlooking the forum and "also spaces round the forum were assigned to private individuals for building on; covered walks and shops were erected" [Craig A. Reynolds, "Jefferson's Temples of Liberty on the James and the Potomac," paper delivered at the Virginia Commonwealth University Architectural History Symposium, 2012]. 




Book III, Plate XV, Leoni Edition of Palladio's Four Books showing the "Squares and Forums or open places and Markets of the Romans." The forum or market is in the center surrounded by the porticos sheltering the
offices of bankers, the basilica (court) is to the left, and the curia (senate house) to the left.

By including a market in the grouping, Jefferson may have been hoping to place the three specialized government buildings, legislative, judicial, and executive, in direct relation to a public market square on a relatively level, but as-yet unselected hilltop site. It may even have been his initial intention to give it a unified form based on the Palladian forum, much as his design for the University of Virginia would to be linked by a colonnade, but here to be lined with the commercial lots of private individuals. 



The Halle au Blé at Paris

That Jefferson had imagined the market as an architecturally distinguished structure is clear from his first thought on viewing the great new glass-lighted dome of the covered courtyard at the Meal Market (Halle au Blé) of Paris in 1786. In a famous letter to Maria Cosway he imagined it as a model for the market in Richmond: 'My visit to Legrand & Molinos had publick utility for it's object. A market is to be built in Richmond. What a commodious plan is that of Legrand & Malinas: especially if we put on it the noble dame of the Halle aux bleds." 

Likely in the summer of 1780. Jefferson sketched a plan for a "Hall of Justice," a two-story rectangular building measuring 70' wide and 90' long that was intended to be one of the three principal state buildings.  Although not shown, a portico at the main entry would have given the building the "cubical" form he often referred to when discussing temple architecture. Entrance was to be through a two-story, square central stair hall inside the door, flanked by offices and smaller rooms. The two principal courtrooms were placed on each side of a passage that extends to the rear pot the building. The second floor had a similar plan. The "hall of justice" appears to have been conceived as a temple form building only a little smaller than the hall for the legislature, suggesting that it was intended to have taken up a flanking position in a symmetrical  tripartite arrangement, on the opposite side from the "State House" for executive boards and committees and representing the three parts of the government.    

As reported by Reps, in 1780 the General Assembly responded to recommendations of the directors by a new act that designated Shockoe Hill as the site of the new “capitol, halls of justice, state house for the executive boards, and house for the governor.” This “open and airy part” of the town had been laid out in lots in 1768 and was already sparsely occupied. A number of old, irregular tenements, mostly on the eastern slope of the hill, and all the streets and squares were to be regularized, unless “by varying the said intervals” (such as is seen today in Governor Street) “more favorable ascents may be procured up the hill.” The location for the public market had been reconsidered and was now to be located below the said hill, on the same side of Shockoe Creek [a block west of where it was built on the opposite, east side of the creek]. In addition, the streets of Shockoe Hill, which were continuations of the undifferentiated Mayo plan of 1737, then all of the same 66-foot width regardless of importance or location, were all to be widened “to a breadth, not less than eighty, or more than one hundred and twenty feet.” Streets were to be laid out “whether straight or curved” to provide access to the tops of the hills from the valley below.



Early 19th-century map (Young, c. 1809)

The uniform street grid was adjusted by the Directors of Public Building in a more subtle way than that mandated by the statute. H Street, the major street on the hill that received the traffic from the old town below by way of the curving County Road, was widened to 120 feet by removing land from the lots on each side. Its unique scale prompted its renaming as Broad Street in later years, Interestingly, H Street was labeled Main Street on a plat of c 1787, indicating its continuity with the principal route through the older sections of the lower town [Richmond City Legislative petition 11 Nov. 1791]. The parallel streets G and I (Grace and Marshall) were to be widened to 100 feet. All the remaining streets, as shown by dotted lines on Jefferson’s drawing of the public squares in 1780, were to be enlarged to 80 feet as directed by the assembly. However, in actuality, Grace and Marshall were not widened as shown.



Jefferson plan of three public squares, 1780, showing
Capitol and Bank streets as laid out at top and bottom.

Jefferson himself traced a proposed plan of the town on Shockoe Hill in 1780. He overlaid the existing undifferentiated grid with the new creation of three squares between Franklin and Grace streets and between 9^th and 12^th streets. These were appropriated for the public buildings with an addition of several lots to the east along the edge of the hill east of Twelfth Street. A revised plan shows a new approach not unlike what was finally built. Grace and Franklin streets are blocked east of Ninth. These vacated streets are added to the total size of the public land and new streets created out of the inner lots in the blocks to the north and south. The public land is consolidated into “three separate parcels,” probably since the commercial function (public market) had been removed from the plan for a modern version of the forum. This would have permitted the separate control of the three squares crowning the hill by each of the three branches of government.

In spite of the irregular terrain, Jefferson shows and describes in a proposal, three elongated public squares separated by widened segments of Tenth and Eleventh streets. The southern half of each of the parcels consisted, however, of steeply sloping terrain that completely precluded the actual extension of the intervening streets shown by Jefferson, so it was inevitable that the parcels, barely outlined on maps for decades, should be conflated into one large square, neatly edged on the north, south and west, but irregular on the east where the main route, the “county road,” climbed the steep slopes of the hill.

While the three squares are not labeled, the central square, occupying the most dramatic and advanced knoll above the river, was to become the site of the Capitol. It is possible that Jefferson intended an advanced central legislative building to be flanked by the Halls of Justice on the west and an Executive Building (Council Chamber was the name given to this structure among the temporary government buildings). As the costs of building and the limitations of revenue became apparent, Jefferson was forced to consent to the combination of all the branches in a single structure, the Capitol of 1785-88. At the same time the three squares were combined into a single "Capitol Square."



R.B. James, Map of Richmond, Henrico Co., c. 1804, showing area of the Capitol Square and the angled route of the county road around it to the east and north.

While his direct involvement with its urban design had ended with his second term as governor in 1781, the city had not strayed too far from his vision as it grew. 



Capitol Square as laid out by Maximilian Godefroy, from R. Young's Map, ca. 1817.

The Capitol was deliberately placed to be seen in the Virginia landscape. Architect Robert Mills understood its power in the landscape: "I remember the impression it made on my mind when first I came in view of it coming from the South. It gave me an idea of the effect of those Greek temples which are the admiration of the world" [Fiske Kimball, American Architecture, 1928]. Fiske Kimball recognized in 1915 the significant of the Virginia Capitol as a "landmark of the first importance" in the "development of modern classical architecture." 

Charles Brownell, in an overview of the Capitol published in 2002, describes new work by his students at the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University and others who have established provocative connections between the building and its historical context in a number of directions. They established that the temple-form building related to well-known use of temples for senate houses in Imperial Rome. Others have shown that the first study that placed the Capitol in a temple-form building dated to the early- to mid-1770s, well before the actual project was begun for a new capitol. When the Directors sent floor plans to Jefferson for his use in Paris, they showed a rectangular  building with porticos on four sides.

In addition, the placement of the "cubical" temple-form building on a prominent hill above the city was shown to be closely associated with Palladian precepts for the location of temples (and the original Capitol, the most significant place in the city of Rome, a temple to Jupiter that stood above the Roman forum).  Finally, a list of four temples that Jefferson associated with the building during the design process added to the understanding of his goals. He intended the Capitol to serve as a museum of the orders to be used as models by the citizens in improving the architecture of the city and state, and he planned to use the columnar orders on the exterior and interior to make a complete "suite" of orders for that purpose.  The interior of the building, including the rotunda and dome, differs greatly from Jefferson's intentions and appears to be the work of architect/builder Samuel Dobie, who was charged with executing the incomplete sets of drawings [Charles E. Brownell, Introduction to the 2002 Edition, Fiske Kimball, The Capitol of Virginia: A Landmark of American Architecture (Richmond VA: Library of Virginia, 2002) xv-xxxix].    

The public square was, as a result, placed in an anti-nodal position away from commercial activity, although Jefferson's original idea seemed to have intended it for a commercial center by including a market. On the contrary, as built on its "open and airy" site, it occupies a distinctly anti-nodal position, rather like the church of 1742 on the top of the corresponding hill to the east. Maximilian Godefroy, a French-born partner of Latrobe’s, applied French formalism to organize the ravines and eroded gullies of the hillside site. His terraces, tree-lined allees, and curved walks imposed a garden-like imprint of order on what had hitherto been almost a desert.

Capitol Square, c. 1850

The official placement of the market along Shockoe Creek in 1782 recognized the reality of the city's composite form and the inevitable separation of state and city functions. The area around the square grew up to be a quiet place of deliberation and reflection far from the business of commercial Main Street below and the constant traffic of Broad Street to the north.

Appropriately, when the city grew sufficiently large to warrant a specialized government building or courthouse of its own it was strategically placed to mediate between the commercial rough-and-tumble of Broad Street and the cultivated and artificial landscape of the Public Square. Rather than provide a civic square for the new building, as was often done, it was oriented toward the public square that already held the Capitol.  Robert Mills provided the design for the new City Hall, which was begun in 1816 and first occupied in 1818. The carefully placed building took its place at the urban scale. It fronted on Capitol Street on axis with the Capitol and stood between it and Broad Street.

The Henrico County Courthouse

The second public building to be constructed in Richmond showed the growing influence of the town in the region. It followed the establishment of the church in the vicinity by nearly thirty years and the construction of the Upper Church on Richmond Hill by less than a decade. The new seat of regional government appears to have been planned to occupy a conventional lot. A long-established understanding of the placement of civic architecture, however, led to its being placed in a dominating position in the center of the adjacent cross street, where, by its unique axial placement (seen in the adjacent 1809 map detail), it could become identified with the grid that ordered the city rather than ruled by it. With the replacement of the colonial building by a temple-form courthouse on the same site in 1825, Richmond joined other Virginia county seats that were centered around a Jeffersonian temple-form "hall of justice." 

Richmond was selected as the new seat of Henrico County in 1750. The public land provided for the courthouse was the half-acre lot 18 on the southwest corner of E and 6^th street, what are now Main and Twenty-second streets near the middle of the town. The trustees must have realized that a corner site was not sufficiently significant a location, so they aligned the building with the center of Sixth (now Twenty-second) Street where, as the principal public building, it was distinguished from ordinary buildings not only by its substantial materials and form, but by its axial setting. The building was prepared for use by 1752, when the court made the move from Varina to Richmond. Although there is no description of the courthouse, the drawing of the prison bounds in the 1780s shows it in the center of the street and the jail located on the adjacent on the public lot. In order to fit within the street the building was longer than it was wide.

Young's Map (1809, above) and Bates Map of Richmond (1835, below) showing the successive
 1750 and 1825 Henrico County courthouses in the center of 22nd St. and the Henrico County Jail
 on the original public lot to the west. St. John's Church is seen at the top center of the lower map.

Building a Courthouse in 1750

According to Carl Lounsbury, the pre-Revolutionary courthouse was often a small and undistinguished building. However, as the eighteenth century progressed, members of the principal county families began to see the courthouse and the church as arenas for architectural expression. As at the Upper Church of Henrico Parish (St. John's Church), local materials and regional building technology could be pressed into the service of a more ambitious program to remake the public face of colonial government. This remaking was not only an effort of the educated gentry, but was funded, not without contention, by the freeholders, who took pride in an increasingly substantial and durable architectural program “in which building matched public expectations” and corresponded with hierarchical political arrangements [Lounsbury 85-89].

While there was never a break with traditional building practices, the increasing wealth of the colony, its more complex political structure, and the “cosmopolitan perspective” of the ruling gentry class “prompted the introduction of academic architectural elements from outside the regional building traditions” [Lounsbury]. Public building were part of the same tradition as private homes, and shared many similar details, but public buildings were distinguished in Virginia by their large scale and by the widespread employment of the arch in the form of large “compass-headed” doors and windows, as in the Upper Church at Richmond.

Henrico County was established in 1619 as one of four cities or boroughs making up the colony. Originally the parishes administered most county-level functions, including moral discipline and road maintenance. As part of an extension of government out from Jamestown eight shires, including Henrico, were to hold monthly commissioners’ courts to settle legal issues. Courts met in houses or taverns. In 1645, the county courts were authorized to hear all cases, both criminal and civil. By 1662, the courts were made up of justices of the peace. A frame courthouse was built in Henrico in the mid-seventeenth century. In 1680, the assembly established a town in the place “where the court house is” across the river from the former site of the town of Henrico, ten miles below Richmond. The site, since at least 1635, of the parish's glebe farm which housed and supported the minster, the tiny settlement was called Varina, after a type of Spanish tobacco. The act of the assembly in 1680 ordained that the village “where the courthouse is” was to be a shipping, trade, and crafts center. Like much of the town-making attempted by the colonial government, little came of the act. The small earthfast frame courthouse stood near a brick glebe house, residence of the rector of Henrico Parish. This was described as standing on blocks in 1688, when it was repaired.

The Form of a Courthouse

The 1750 Chesterfield County Courthouse that used the early eighteenth-century 

Henrico Courthouse as its model. 

Henrico County moved like other Virginia counties to improve the court's setting at Varina. In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the justices built a new, more substantial courthouse. The structure was of brick, but there is no first-hand record of its appearance or form. Richmond was made the county seat in 1750 because, with the creation of Chesterfield County out of the half of Henrico located below the James River, Varina was no longer centrally or conveniently located. In keeping with the imitative nature of colonial building practices, the Chesterfield County court in 1750 used the old Henrico Courthouse as their model for their courthouse. The new structure was to be built “of the same dimensions and material,” except that it was to have a plank floor. Photographs of the Chesterfield Courthouse give a clue as to the form of its Henrico predecessor. They show it to have been a rectangular building with five bays on the front, including a central door, segmentally arched windows, a modillion cornice, and glazed-header Flemish bond walls.

The new Henrico County Courthouse of 1825 from a Virginia Mutual Assurance policy, 1825.

The old Henrico County courthouse was abandoned at the same time that it was chosen as the model for new seat of Chesterfield County’s government. It is likely that, if the new Henrico Courthouse in Richmond was similarly modeled on its predecessor, its location in the street would have caused its builders to vary its design by putting its main entrance in the north gable end. The site made a building that was wider than it was long impractical. In its urban context and with the comparative wealth of the county, the 1750 building was probably at least as finely made as most other mid-eighteenth-century courthouse in the vicinity.

We do not know what the 1750 courthouse looked like, but its successor, built in 1825, was a brick building 70 feet long and 40 feet wide, similar to these local eighteenth-century prototypes. The new building was of a single story and was fronted by a pedimented Doric portico. Entry doors in each of the outer bays flanked a large central window, a design unique among Virginia courthouses. The building was planned by Samuel Sublett and constructed by a group including William C. Allen and William Street [Charles Brownell, Jeffersonian Courthouse in Virginia, 1810-1850. National Historic Landmark Thematic Nomination Project, 2006]. 

The courthouse of 1825 was placed in the same axial location as its predecessor. The new building incorporated the new temple form assumed by Virginia courthouses, which, as Charles Brownell has shown, was generated by Jefferson's project for a temple-form "hall of justice" across Virginia's counties [Brownell, 2006]. It is formally related to the nearby Virginia Capitol, visible to the west on Shockoe Hill. There its impressive form and position punctuated the western end of an axial route that connected the state government at the Capitol on Shockoe Hill with county government in the center of the old section of town in on the river. The importance of this linkage is indicated by the route prescribed for important civic parades during the antebellum era. These carefully ordered public displays of civic unity began at the courthouse and processed to an end point at the Capitol.

Parades along the route include one for Lafayette's visit in 1824, another in 1831 for the funeral of President Monroe, and the procession in 1832 to celebrate the 100^th birthday of George Washington, beginning at the "new courthouse" along E Street to 5^th and from 5^th to H and along that to the First Baptist Church at the east end of Broad Street. The funeral procession for Jefferson in 1826, which also followed the route from courthouse to capitol, showed the city and state hierarchically arrayed in its full integrity: Governor, Council, Officers of state, officers and soldiers of the Revolution and Society of Cincinnati, clergy and relatives of the deceased, Federal and State Committee of Arrangements, the mayor and corporate authorities of Richmond, citizens of Richmond, and the military [W. A. Christian, 1914].

The 1842 Henrico County Courthouse in the 1850s, relocated to the public square on the corner.

When Richmond became a city in 1782, the city's "common hall" continued to work closely with the county. The county retained jurisdiction over overseers of the poor, over criminal cases, and over the city's tobacco warehouses, while the city was authorized to organize a militia and to provide judicial oversight for slaves that lived within its limits. In 1822 the county court's session time was extended due to the increase in case load as the city grew. Eventually, with the passage of the Underwood Constitution in 1869, the city no longer had any direct political connection to the county. The anomalous position of the county government in an independent civil unit undoubtedly reduced the status of the structure as a civic building. The courthouse had been rebuilt on the public land on the corner lot in the 1842 by Isaac Goddin, presumably as a result of increased commercial activity and traffic along the nearby City Dock made opening up the street seem desirable. The county appears to have reused the three-bay Doric portico, but the new building was two stories in height and featured a central entry.

Sketch of the 1842 Henrico County Courthouse, c1895, Richmond Times-Dispatch [Valentine History Center].

Damaged by fire in 1865, the courthouse of 1842 was replaced by a new or rebuilt structure in 1867 by William H. Yeatman [Brownell, 2006]. The building was still fronted with a tetrastyle portico, but was shown on the 1886 Sanborn map as being four stories in height (presumably including a raised basement). 

Public Square showing the courthouse as 4 stories in height [Sanborn Map, 1886]

The 1867 courthouse served the county until it was replaced in 1896. Repair of the old building was determined to be unfeasible. Richmond architect Carl Ruehrmund, who studied architecture and civil engineering at the Royal Academy in Berlin, provided the design for the building that still occupies the site. It contrasted sharply with the trim classicism of the series of buildings it replaced [Peters, Virginia's Historic Courthouses, 1995]. Not until the 1970s did the county government relocate out of the city, after which the Victorian courthouse remained empty for many years.

The former Henrico County Courthouse of 1893,
located on the original corner public square on Main Street.

The Richmond Church

St. John’s Church. 1865. View from NW of original west end. From Civil War glass negative collection, Library of Congress.

There were no public buildings in the initial settlement at the Falls of the James River. The first to be built was a small chapel on what is now known as Chapel Island in the James, established in the 1720s. When built in 1742-3, the new church at Richmond architecturally proclaimed its civic role in the young town by its free-standing position on a half-square at the highest point of the grid of 1737. At the same time, the church, by its traditional orientation to the east, proclaimed its position as ascendant over political conventions.

William Byrd had the town of Richmond laid out in 1737. Since, as a privately sponsored settlement, there was no initial intention for any public buildings in the town, land was not set aside for that purpose. Soon after the town was laid out, however, Byrd convinced the vestry of Henrico Parish to place a proposed new upper church at Richmond. He intentionally gave them two prominently placed but marginal lots at the northeast corner of the plat. These were at the highest point on what was then known as Indian Town Hill overlooking the lower town.

The new church on the hill (known, since the mid-nineteenth century as St. John’s Church) was a marker of the rise of the town above a mere entrepot. Henrico Parish was over hundred years old and served the entire county of Henrico. Most Virginia parishes, responsible for building and maintaining churches, hiring ministers, caring for the indigent, settling boundaries, and punishing minor moral offenses, existed as a coterminous, spiritually oriented jurisdiction separate and parallel to that of the county. The church existed to remind the polity of its spiritual orientation, in much the same manner as the town’s first public building. Completed in 1742, it was aligned to point east in the prescribed medieval manner, ignored the street grid, resisting by its diagonal siting to fit neatly into what must have then been a barely discernable urban order. In many ways the church most closely resembled its rural rather than its urban contemporaries. At first, the majority of parishioners probably lived on farms in the higher ground around Richmond.

Mijacah Bates Map (1835) shows church near the top.

A drawing from the 1780s shows the county jail and the boundaries beyond which prisoners were not permitted to pass. A narrow path followed what must be a footpath up the hill diagonally to the church so that debtors and other prisoners could attend the services. The surrounding churchyard provided the town with a central place for burials. Often difficult of access from below, the church was, however, located on the side of a major road leading to the northeast, now know as Nine Mile Road.

The church was an elegant, if plain, rectangular building that included distinctive features such as segmentally arched window heads and a dentil cornice on the weatherboarded exterior and expensive paneled wainscoting and pews on the interior, as well as numerous costly and specialized furnishings required by the liturgy of the church. It was unmistakably a church, yet it shared the vocabulary of other urban and rural buildings such as courthouses and grand houses. It was the first public building of architectural pretensions in the western portion of the county. Although altered through the years, it retains a significant amount of original material [Worsham, Historic Structure Report].

On December 20, 1739 the vestry, ready to push ahead with the parish’s current building projects, met to select undertakers for two projects: construction of the new church and of a barn at the glebe. As undertaker for the church, they entered into an agreement with one of themselves, vestryman Richard Randolph. Col. Richard Randolph of Curl’s (1686-1748), burgess in 1740, and at one time treasurer of the colony, was one of the most prominent men of the parish and the colony and had served on the vestry from before 1730. As a member of the upper echelons of the colony’s elite, Col. Randolph was possibly drawn into the building process at Richmond by the remoteness of the location and the difficulty of finding an available professional in the immediate area.

The traditional practice in many parishes was to base the design of a new building on an existing building with which the vestry were familiar, either close at hand or, in the case of an ambitious program, on a more unusual building at a distance [Upton 31]. The Henrico vestry took as their “moddle,” the principal parish church at Curls, a proven church form.Where some vestries haggled over details, changing specifications and dimensions, the Henrico vestry never altered their pattern. Although we do not know what Curl’s Church looked like nor when it was built, it was almost certainly of frame construction and was probably rectangular in form like its successor, the original Upper Church at Richmond.

The subtle curve-topped windows at Richmond are a distinguished feature. Dell Upton discusses the significance of pedimented doors and rounded shapes like arched or compass-headed windows and ceilings and curved communion rails as setting apart the church as exalted above other buildings by the use of conventional signs of honor and dignity.

Alternate conjectural floor plans for the original Richmond Church with four windows on the north and south (left) and with five windows (right). Extant wall posts are shown hatched. There is documentary evidence of a south door and physical evidence of the chancel pews. The pulpit location is conjectural.

The form most popular for Virginia churches at that time was a simple rectangle, often considerably more than twice as long as it was wide. At twenty-five by sixty feet, the size of the church at Richmond was common among other churches in the colony [Upton 57]. The length of the frame upper chapel at Christ Church Parish, Middlesex County, was settled at twenty-five by sixty feet in the specifications dating from 1711. According to Dell Upton, the overall size had to do with the acoustic limits mandated by the need for clearly audible preaching. Church lengths extended from around forty feet to sixty, but none were ever built that exceeded seventy feet in length. The frequent provision of a double square plus an additional partial square to form the popular twenty-five-by sixty foot form may represent the conceptual separation of the chancel from the rest of the church even though it was visually incorporated into the uninterrupted interior space.

Plate 45. Illustration from Meade, Old Churches,Ministers, and Families of Virginia, 1857.

The church served Richmond’s only church for nearly fifty years. It was altered in response to disestablishment and the growth and westward tendency of the city’s population. A large wing was added to the north side of the church in 1830 to increase its capacity. The vestry was careful to extend the modillion cornice and beaded weatherboard of the original building. The church began to respond architecturally to its changed responsibilities as a disestablished church competing for members with a variety of denominations. The original church was transformed into minor transepts adjoining a large rectangular preaching hall oriented to the south. A three-stage tower was added in 1833, topped by a miniature octagonal element derived from the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, an icon of Greek Revival architecture.