Richmond, Virginia's City Docks: Antebellum Gateway to the City's Commerce

Richmond's City Docks, completed between 1816 and 1819, were a significant feat of engineering that provided the city with a large body of quiet water unaffected by tides, high water, and most storms, and that was accessible by ocean-going boats.
This important civic improvement helped Richmond maintain its place as one of the world's sources of fine flour and tobacco. Both were renowned for their quality and shipped around the world. Part of the City Docks still survive near the Great Ship Lock Park along the route of the present-day Kanawha Canal tour boats.



The Old Dock at Liverpool (1709-1715), shown in 1723, protected from the tides by wooden gates, was built to the designs of engineer Thomas Steers. It was the first commercial dock [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Dock].

A dock in contemporary British use was an enclosed area of water created by enclosing a natural tidal pool or stream mouth with an embankment or by excavation. When the level of water was controlled, it permitted quicker turn-around of cargo and dramatically increased the potential volume of trade.  Such docks had  first appeared in Britain with the opening of Thomas Steer’s Dock (the Old Dock) in Liverpool in 1715. This dock, key to the city’s commercial success, was the world's first commercial wet dock, It was provided with gates at the entrance to keep the water level  and protect ships as they were loaded and unloaded. The dock was surrounded by warehouses and could hold as many as 100 ships.

Detail of 1738 plan of Town Dock, Boston, Mass., Boston Public Library.

The idea caught on in the colonies. Boston, Massachusetts had a “Town Dock” provided with a wharf next to the market as early as 1738, created by partially enclosing an inset known as Bendell’s Cove.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Hull#   Maps showing the Old Dock in the city of Hull (1774) and later interconnected docks opening off the River Humber.

West India Docks: this engraving was published as Plate 92 of Microcosm of London (1810). It shows one side of one of the three large docks, lined with ships and five-story warehouses [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_India_Docks].

In 1773, the Corporation of the City of Hull and city merchants organized the "Dock Company" on the east coast of England. An act of Parliament gave the Hull organization authority to raise capital, making it the earliest dock company in Britain permitted by statute. Soon after, Georgian London and other British ports were marked by the expansion of docks, many of which  were surrounded with walls to prevent theft of goods.


The Richmond Dock Company

As Richmond’s position as a center for manufacturing and trade improved in late eighteenth century, conditions for shipping and warehousing goods remained primitive. At early eighteenth-century Richmond, a miniscule port in comparison to Boston, small boats had long been accommodated at the well-known Rock Landing, located on the upstream side of Shockoe Creek just below the falls. Boats probably also could land behind the shelter of Chapel Island in the old channel of Shockoe Creek, which was reserved for the use of citizens as the “commons of the city.” The principal deep-water port was at Rocketts, immediately downstream from the city.

 

The Byrd Plat of 1737 shows Shockoe Creek (the narrow creek to the left of the town) flowing parallel to Cary Street, following the channel that would later be enclosed and edged with a stone embankment to form the City Dock of Richmond.

 

Young’s Map of Richmond, 1809. The map shows the mouth of Shockoe Creek near the west end of Chapel Island at the Rock Landing, the highest point where boats could land in the period before the construction of the City Dock. Here, boats were loaded with tobacco from William Byrd’s warehouses, located on the west side of the creek, beginning in the 1720s. The 1737 section of the city seen above is to the right side of this image.

Richmond’s smooth functioning as a port was foremost in the mind of the Virginia General Assembly when it adjusted and expanded the rules governing the trustees of the town in 1773. The first duty of the trustees was “to meet as often as they shall think necessary for appointing a public quay, and such places upon the river for public landings as they shall think most convenient, and if the same shall be necessary, shall direct the making of wharfs and cranes at such public landings for the public use” [An Act, to establish and enlarge the power of the trustees of the town of Richmond, in the county of Henrico, and for other purposes. March, 1773, Ch. 6, 8 Stat. Lar. 65.5.] 

In 1780, the same patterns held: access to the Rock Landing, referred to variously as the “Shockoe,” “upper,” or “Warehouse” Landing, “much obstructed of late by freshes, and by the natural course of Shockoe Creek being altered”  by banks of sand “which, if not quickly removed, may render the navigation to the upper landing useless” for the profit of both the citizens of the town and the agricultural producers of the back country, was to be reopened by a company authorized to raise private investment for that purpose [An Act, for locating the Publick Squares, to enlarge the Town of Richmond, and for other purposes. May, 1780]. After the opening of the James River Canal in 1790 expanding the potential for shipping through the city, the limitations of the arrangements for loading the produce directly onto ships became increasingly apparent.

John Williamson, Part of plan of the city of Richmond embracing lots in basin of James River Canal and adjoining lots, 1793. Board of Public Works, Library of Virginia. This shows alternate paths for the canal to the new basin below Shockoe Hill and the steep outfall, not long before it was utilized as a power source by the Haxall Mills.

 The James River Company, chartered in 1785, ensured that tobacco, iron, coal, wheat, stone, lumber, and pork from the plantations to the west could be brought by boat directly into the heart of the city at the Great Basin. The canal permitted direct transport around the Falls of the James River for the special cargo boats called "batteaux". All produce that was brought around the falls was unloaded here and placed in warehouses, from which it could be taken by wagon through the city to the wharves downstream where larger ships could be tied up.

Addition of a great canal basin in 1793-95 had not only provided a location for shipping warehouses and wharves, but also supplied water to what would soon become a series of huge merchant flour and lumber mills, beginning with the opening of the massive Haxall Flour Mills in 1798. These produced fine white flour transported around the world as a result of an increase in wheat production in competition with tobacco in the areas west of Richmond.    

In 1816, flush economic conditions at the close of the war with Great Britain encouraged the city to consider improving access by sea-going ships, most of which at this time anchored just downstream at the city seagoing port of Rockets. Direct transfer by water of the city’s flour and tobacco products could only be assured by the creation of an artificial harbor or wet dock.

In the European tradition of building sheltered docks to foster water transport, the Virginia Legislature passed a bill in 1816 permitting James River to be cleared from Rocketts as far as Mayo’s Bridge, and to admit boats into Shockoe Creek and as high in the river as Haxall’s Mills [Christian 93]. At this time Ariel Cooley, a canal builder from Springfield, Massachusetts, who had been involved in developing navigation along the the Schulkyll in Philadelphia, was engaged to make locks between the basin and the river. According to Samuel Mordecai, he underestimated the power of the water that he set loose to open a channel to the river and the 13 rubble stone and wooden locks and gates for which he was paid $49,000 were so poorly made that they were sealed shut. New stone locks were opened in 1854 [Mordecai, Richmond in Bygone Days, 1856, 235-6].

The Richmond Dock Company opened its books to investors that same year, 1816, a year of great economic excitement in the city. The city’s Common Hall purchased 1,000 shares in the company at a cost of fifty dollars per share. The dock appears to have been completed by 1819. Although the original vision of the James River Canal had been to link the canal terminus at the basin between Eighth and Eleventh Streets with the tidal river and the sea, this was not accomplished right away. The north-south streets of the city were extended south to the docks and a row of new squares laid out on the former city common, suitable for the construction of warehouses on the edge of the wharf. These were named for local and national figures such as Byrd, Washington, Franklin, Carrington, and Henry.

 

 

Detail, Plan of the Richmond Docks and James River from Rocketts to Warwick, 1818, Virginia Board of Public Works, Library of Virginia. The design for the new city dock is at the top and the port of Rockets at the bottom.  Mayos Bridge can be seen crossing the basin on its way to the south. Shockoe Creek appears to run under the basin and 18th Street passes over it.  The lower lock is parallel with 24th Street. North is to the right. The plan varies somewhat from what was built.

The new City Dock was laid out by an expert in canal construction who was personally familiar with the latest developments in British dock design. It was designed by the Board of Public Works’ Principal Civil Engineer Loammi Baldwin, Jr. (1780-1838). Baldwin was the son of Loammi Baldwin (1744-1807), an important early figure in American civil engineering and especially canal building. He designed and built the Middlesex Canal in Massachusetts between 1794 and 1803. Loammi Baldwin, Jr. assisted his father with the Middlesex Canal and soon after 1807 traveled to England to view public projects. He was active in Virginia between 1817 and 1820. The plan seen here was prepared by Baldwin in 1818 for the Board of Public Works shows the dock before construction began.  The dock consisted of two basins fed by a “feeder” from upstream and a canal to the south that entered the river by a series of locks. The was created by placing earthen embankments around the former route of Shockoe Creek on the north side of a strip of land known as Chapel Island, but originally connected at it west end to the north bank of the river.  Three basins, Upper, Middle, and Lower, were extended to the east and west with canals connecting to the Haxall Mill race above and the James River Below. A great deal of fill was required to extend the main dock basins out into the river in front of the old Rock Landing.

 

 

 

Young’s Map of c 1817 showing the proposed canal locks (at bottom center left) connecting the Upper, Middle, and Lower Basins of the City Dock (seen at left) with the Haxall Mill Canal, bringing water into the docks and permitting access to the flour production of the city’s principal mill. The old (curved) and new (straight) paths of Shockoe Creek are both shown.

This proposed design for a new, larger dock between Mayo’s Island and the existing dock involves adding a new locks [one is shown at right]. The drawing documents the existing City Dock, the locks leading to the Canal Basin, and Mayo’s Bridge (and its bridge over the canal) in detail. North is to the bottom.  [Survey of the James river between the dock and the island, Virginia Board of Public Works,1829, Library of Virginia]. North is to the bottom of the drawing.

Detail of the City Dock as built showing how Shockoe Creek entered directly into the dock basin (bottom center) but was provided with a spillway on the opposite side for overflow during high water. [Survey of the James river between the dock and the island, Virginia Board of Public Works,1829, Library of Virginia].

The James River and Kanawha Company
The state assumed control of the James River Company in 1820. The James River and Kanawha Company, organized in 1835 to connect the trans-Appalachian West with the Chesapeake Bay by means of a canal, took control of the canal above the falls at Richmond. The canal was extended to Lynchburg in 1840 and the Valley of Virginia in 1851.  The canal scheme was under constant pressure to expand the access for both shipping and water power below the falls. The Virginia Board of Public Works undertook a study for another unexecuted enlargement of the docks in 1836 to accommodate as many as 120 ships in a great new dock beside Mayos Bridge. This dock, protected by an earthen wall, was kept filled by ponding the entire river behind a dam that extended across the river parallel to 16th Street. A wide ship canal led from the south side of the pond to enter the river at Warwick, where the river allowed passage for ships of greater size. The plan for a ship canal was never executed.

The canal was enlarged in several stages, from an average initial depth of 3 1/2 feet and width of 40 feet. The canal as far as Lynchburg and including the portion running through the city, was expanded in the late 1830s to five feet in depth and fifty feet in width. Water management and sufficient supply remained a contentious factor between the canal company and the manufacturers who leased the rights [Michael Raber et al., Historical and Archeaological Assessment, Tredegar Iron Works Site, Richmond Virginia, report for the Valentine Museum and Ethyl Corp, 1992].



 Detail, Map and Profile of a Ship Canal from Richmond to Warwick Being the Proposed Plan for the Connexion of the James River and Kanawha Improvement with Tide Water, 1841.  Virginia Board of Public Works. Library of Virginia.

In 1841, the canal company purchased the Richmond Dock Company’s property. New plans drawn up in 1841 called for a new canal to run from the arsenal along a new embankment at the river edge, bypassing the old basin and suggesting that the north side of the river would be extended far enough to the south to encompass Mayo’s Island.  This was never executed.

Map of Part of the City of Richmond showing the James River and Kanawha Canal, 1841, Board of Public Works, Library of Virginia. A proposed route for a branch of the canal is through Mayos Island.    

Instead, the canal company improved and enlarged the city dock to accommodate larger ships by 1845. The ship canal was lengthened and the lowest lock moved east to 26th Street. From 1849 to 1851, the dock was greatly enlarged, five granite locks replaced the old wooden locks in a line paralleling Canal Street up the steep hill to the Great Basin of the canal (the fourth and fifth survive in place). Turning basins were added between 9th and 14th streets; the Great Ship Lock was built further east of the dock, in line with 28th Street, between 1850 and 1854. The new facilities greatly improved transportation to and from the city.  Between 1855 and 1860, the Richmond Dock Company reported that the number of vessels leaving the dock increased from 1,377 to 2,337, including packets for New York, Boston, and Baltimore.

Mijacah Bates’ Map shows the form of a portion of the City Dock in 1835., including the entry lock next to 26th Street. Comparison with earlier maps indicates that the original ship canal ended in a lock at 23rd Street, where the canal widens. This map makes it clear that the canal was lengthened and the ship lock rebuilt between the initial construction and the rebuilding about 1850 (see below).

 

Map showing the fully developed City Dock complex of pools, locks, drawbridges, and basins just before the Civil War [Adams, I.H. Map of the City of Richmond, Virginia, 1858, published 1864].

As part of the new design, Shockoe Creek can be seen to pass in a culvert beneath the canal. The former site of the Rock Landing is where the Gas Works is shown. At about this time, the area at the north end of Chapel Island as far as the mouth of Shockoe Creek was expanded into the river. It incorporated a small island called Mayo Island and Toll House Island on the Board of Public Works plans of 1818 and 1829, as well as the riverside ground occupied by the Vauxhall pleasure garden. The edge of the reclaimed land was protected by a substantial granite embankment and housed the Richmond and Danville Railroad yard and terminal.


New warehouses were built into the bank beside the renovated stone wharf of the City Dock, beginning in the mid-1840s, to receive goods and produce. In particular, a series of fourteen large brick warehouses was built between the dock and Cary Street, just as in other urban docks, by a private investor, John Enders, for lease or resale to others. The three that were used for the famous Libby Prison were at one end of the long block, most of which burned soon after they were built. Enders and Gen. J.B. Harvie were active in the building of the dock. Other warehouses and tobacco factories were constructed on nearby blocks, which was transformed into an industrial district. When, after 1880, the train replaced the canal along the north bank of the river, the industrial tissue was renewed on a larger scale with the long row of tobacco factories filling the squares between Main and Cary Street.

Libby Prison (one of Enders Warehouses) and the City Dock from Benson J. Lossing. Harper’s Encyclopedia of the United States, vol. 7, 1912.

Detail, A. Hoen and Co, City of Richmond, Virginia from Manchester ,1876. A range of boats in various positions are seen behind the embankment of the City Dock. The gap towards the right is the outflow of Shockoe Creek during periods of high rainfall [Valentine Museum].

Enders Warehouses in the City Dock after the Civil War.

This view from Harper’s Magazine in 1863, shows the dramatic slowdown in traffic during the war years. Mayos Bridge and the mills are seen in the distance.

 

Another view of boats pulled up at the wide wharf along the north side of the City Dock also shows the line of warehouses to the north and the vast mill structures to the immediate west [Richmond Quay, London Illustrated News 1862].

The Virginia Steam Sugar Refinery was opened at 17th and Dock Street on the City Dock in 1860. Boats, both steam- and sail-powered, are seen taking on cargo in this advertising card published many years later in a city paper, c. 1938.

Detail, Beers Map of Richmond, 1876. Mayo’s Warehouse is seen here next to the railroad depot.

The City Dock in the late nineteenth century, showing a sea-going ship and the revolving bridge that carried 17th Street over the canal [City on the James, 1893].




This illustration shows the opposite end of the 17th Street bridge and the railroad depot that was built on added fill between the river and the dock. It permitted the ready movement of goods between ships and trains [City on the James, 1893].

With the closure of the canal in 1878, the City Dock was acquired by the Richmond and Alleghany Railroad. The railroad later sold it to the William R. Trigg Company, which developed a ship-building industry along the south side of the dock on Chapel Island. The Trigg Compnay specialized in the building of boats for industry and of torpedo boats and destroyers for the government, which they launched from the side into the canal. The company employed two thousand workers and occupied as much as a mile of the ship canal. After the death of William R. Trigg in 1902, with three boats under contract, the business failed and the company went into receivership. The city acquired the dock facilities east of Seventeenth Street in 1912, built new warehouses, and attempted unsuccessfully to re-establish the city as a major port [Mordecai, John Brooke in Richmond, Capital of Virginia, 1938, 274-275, 283-284].  



View on board deck of USS Dale while bring outfitted at Trigg Shipyard, 1902 [Naval Historical Center]. The three-masted schooner John S. Beacham is on the other side of Dale. They appear to be located below the Great Ship Lock.




Launching of a destroyer at the Trigg Shipyards [VCU Library]. The launching of the USS Shubrick in 1899 brought President William McKinley to Richmond.




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.