Richmond, Virginia

• 1. Introduction

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  Richmond, Virginia sits at the James River's fall line, a geographic fact that has shaped nearly everything about it. The point where the river's rapids meet tidal water made this place a natural crossroads for boats, then railroads, then interstates. Patrick Henry stood in St. John's Church in 1775 and delivered the words "Give me liberty or give me death!" That speech took place in this city. Eighty-six years later, Richmond became the capital of the Confederate States of America. A century after that, a woman named Maggie L. Walker became the first Black female bank president in the United States, right here. The city incorporated in 1742, yet the Powhatan people had already named the region for the falls that would define it. What threads connect a colonial tobacco port to a Civil War capital to a modern metropolitan area of more than 1.37 million people? And how does a city with one of the country's highest poverty rates also produce some of its most celebrated architecture, food, and music? Richmond's story is neither simple nor settled.

• 2. Before the English Arrived

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  Captain Christopher Newport led English explorers northwest up the James River in 1607, pushing inland from the settlement at Jamestown. He reached territory held by the Arrohattocs, a people within the broader Powhatan Nation. The very name Powhatan derives from "Pawat-hanne," meaning "falls in a stream," a reference to the same rocky cascade that would later anchor the city. By 1609, relations between the Arrohattocs and the English colonists had deteriorated to the point where the tribe refused to trade with them. A 1610 report by William Strachey noted the tribe's dwindling numbers. By 1611, their town of Henrico had been abandoned entirely, and Sir Thomas Dale arrived to build Henricus in its place. That same year saw the first European settlement in Central Virginia established at Henricus, where Falling Creek meets the James River. In 1619, Virginia Company settlers founded the Falling Creek Ironworks at the same site. The landscape would not stay quiet: in 1656, the Battle of Bloody Run was fought near the falls after tensions arose from an influx of Manahoacs and Nahyssans from the north. It was not until 1737 that planter William Byrd II commissioned Major William Mayo to lay out a town grid, completing it in April of that year. Byrd named the settlement after an English town near London, because the curve of the James at the fall line reminded him of his house at Richmond Hill on the Thames.

• 3. Revolution and Early Republic

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  On the 18th of April 1780, Virginia's seat of government moved from Williamsburg to Richmond. The reasoning was strategic: a more central location served the state's growing western population and, in theory, put the capital farther from British naval raids along the coast. One year later, the theory was tested. Loyalist troops under Benedict Arnold swept into Richmond and burned it, forcing Governor Thomas Jefferson to flee while the militia under Sampson Mathews failed to hold the city. Richmond recovered quickly. Within a year of the burning the city was thriving again, and in 1786 the Virginia General Assembly enacted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the document Jefferson had drafted in 1779, separating church and state across the commonwealth. In 1788, the Virginia State Capitol was completed. Jefferson and French architect Charles-Louis Clérisseau designed it in the Greek Revival style; it became the first U.S. government building in the neoclassical manner and set the template for state houses and federal buildings across the young country, including the White House and the Capitol in Washington. To move goods across the Appalachian Mountains, George Washington helped design the James River and Kanawha Canal, which started at Westham and cut east to Richmond, allowing cargo to shift from flat-bottomed river bateaux above the fall line to ocean-going ships below. The figure of a canal boatman sits at the center of the city flag. Because of that canal and the hydropower generated by the falls, Richmond became one of the largest manufacturing centers in the South, home to iron works and flour mills that served both regional and national markets.

• 4. Confederate Capital

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  Five days after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the Virginia Convention voted on the 17th of April 1861, to secede from the United States. On May 20 that year, the Confederate States Congress voted to relocate its national capital from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond. Three days later, Virginia voters ratified the Ordinance of Secession to make it official. The decision put Richmond roughly 100 miles from Washington, D.C., at the end of a long supply line and in the direct path of Union ambitions. The city held Confederate government offices, hospitals, and a major railroad hub. It also contained the Tredegar Iron Works, the largest Confederate arms factory, which produced artillery, heavy ordnance machinery, and the 723 tons of armor plating that clad the CSS Virginia, described in the source as the world's first ironclad ship used in war. The Confederate executive mansion, the "White House of the Confederacy," stood two blocks from the Jefferson-designed State Capitol on Clay Street. Union General George B. McClellan threatened but failed to take Richmond during the Seven Days Battles in late June and early July 1862. Richmond held for four years, requiring the bulk of the Army of Northern Virginia for its defense. By the 1st of April 1865, Union cavalry under Philip Sheridan defeated Confederate forces under George Pickett at Five Forks Junction and advised Ulysses S. Grant to order a general advance. When Union forces broke through Confederate lines on the Boydton Plank Road, Confederate casualties exceeded 5,000, roughly a tenth of Lee's defending army. On the 2nd of April 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet left Richmond by train with the treasury's gold and government archives. Confederate troops destroyed tobacco warehouses and exploded the city's gunpowder magazine in the early morning of April 3, killing several people sheltering in an almshouse and a man on 2nd Street. General Godfrey Weitzel, commanding the 25th Corps of the United States Colored Troops, accepted the city's surrender later that morning. About 25% of Richmond's buildings were destroyed. President Abraham Lincoln visited the fallen capital on April 4, meeting Confederate Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell. Lee surrendered his remaining approximately 10,000 troops at Appomattox Court House on April 9, meeting Grant at the McLean Home.

• 5. Jackson Ward and Black Commerce

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  Freed slaves and their descendants built a thriving economic community in Richmond after the Civil War, centered on the Jackson Ward neighborhood. The district earned the name "Wall Street of Black America" and was compared to Harlem as a cultural hub. In 1903, Maggie L. Walker chartered St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, served as its president, and became the first Black female bank president in the United States. Charles Thaddeus Russell, Richmond's first Black architect, designed the bank's office. That institution still operates today as the Consolidated Bank and Trust Company, described as the country's oldest surviving African-American bank. John Mitchell Jr., a newspaper editor, civil rights activist, and politician, was another prominent figure from this era. The neighborhood's iron-fronted buildings reflect another dimension of Richmond's Black commercial history: Jackson Ward is noted for particularly elaborate cast-iron porches, balconies, and fences, many never replicated outside the city. At the height of iron production in the 1890s, 25 foundries operated in Richmond, employing nearly 3,500 metal workers, a figure seven times the number of general construction workers at the time. In 1996, racial tensions surfaced again when Arthur Ashe's bronze statue was added to Monument Avenue among statues of Confederate figures, generating months of controversy before the statue was completed on the 10th of July 1996. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, most of those Confederate statues were removed. The last, honoring General A. P. Hill, came down on the 12th of December 2022. Today the only statue remaining on Monument Avenue is Ashe's.

• 6. Electric Innovation

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  Frank J. Sprague developed a trolley system called the Richmond Union Passenger Railway that opened its first line in 1888, stringing an overhead wire to a trolley pole that fed current to electric motors on the car's trucks. The system worked. Electric streetcar lines spread rapidly from Richmond to cities across the country. Meanwhile, James Albert Bonsack of Roanoke invented the world's first cigarette-rolling machine between 1880 and 1881, dramatically industrializing tobacco production at a moment when Richmond warehouses were already central to the trade. Lewis Ginter, founder of Allen and Ginter, then one of the world's largest tobacco companies, poured his wealth back into Richmond. He built the Jefferson Hotel and developed suburbs north of the city that became a model for suburban development nationally. He was quoted saying "I am for Richmond, first and last." By the beginning of the 20th century, the city's population had reached 85,050 in five square miles, making it the most densely populated city in the Southern United States. The trolley network that had enabled that growth was phased out after World War II; a transition to buses began in May 1947 and was completed on the 25th of November 1949. Richmond had also become a major railroad crossroads, home to what the source describes as the world's first triple railroad crossing. Canned beer was first made commercially available in Richmond in 1935, an unheralded innovation that would reshape how Americans bought and drank beer for generations.

• 7. Economy and Poverty Side by Side

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  Law and finance have long anchored Richmond's economy. The city hosts the Virginia Supreme Court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and a Federal Reserve Bank, making it one of about a dozen American cities to have both. Major law firms including Hunton Andrews Kurth and McGuireWoods are headquartered here. The greater metropolitan area includes Fortune 500 companies such as Dominion Energy, CarMax, Altria, and Performance Food Group. Philip Morris USA opened a $350 million research and development facility in the Virginia BioTechnology Research Park in 2007. The Martin Agency, a Richmond-based advertising firm founded in 1965, employs 500 people, and VCU's graduate advertising school has consistently ranked as the best graduate advertising program in the country. Against that backdrop, as of 2016-24.8% of Richmond residents lived below the federal poverty line, the second-highest rate among the 30 largest cities and counties in Virginia. A 2016 Annie E. Casey Foundation report found Richmond's child poverty rate at 39%, more than double Virginia's overall rate. The city also held the second-highest rate of eviction filings and judgments of any American city with a population of 100,000 or more at that time. Crime fell sharply between 2004 and 2009, when the major crime rate dropped 47 percent to its lowest level in more than a quarter century, and by 2012 Richmond was no longer ranked among the top 200 most dangerous cities. The 2020 Census recorded a population of 226,610 with a median age of 32.4 years, and 40.2% of all households made up of individuals living alone.

• 8. Literature, Art, and Architecture

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  Edgar Allan Poe grew up in Richmond, and the city's oldest stone house is a museum dedicated to his life and works. The Southern Literary Messenger, which published his writing, is among many notable publications that started in Richmond. Pulitzer Prize winner Ellen Glasgow and novelist James Branch Cabell also called the city home, as did Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, who was born here, and novelist Tom Wolfe. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Virginia Historical Society, and numerous other institutions anchor a Museum District west of the Boulevard. Agecroft Hall, a Tudor manor house originally built in Lancashire, England in the late 15th century, was relocated to the Windsor Farms neighborhood on the James River. Richmond's architectural range is exceptional: the Virginia State Capitol, designed by Jefferson and Clérisseau in 1785, is the second-oldest U.S. statehouse in continuous use and the first U.S. government building in the neoclassical style. Ralph Adams Cram, known for the Princeton University Chapel and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, designed buildings at the University of Richmond including Jeter and Ryland Halls. Minoru Yamasaki designed the Federal Reserve Building. Steven Holl designed the VCU Institute for Contemporary Art, which opened in 2018. At the height of iron production in the 1890s, Richmond's collection of cast-iron architectural details was second in concentration only to New Orleans. Since 2013, the city has gained more than 100 murals through projects including the RVA Street Art Festival, led by local artist Ed Trask, featuring work by international artists such as Aryz, Roa, Ron English, and Natalia Rak. After the George Floyd protests of summer 2020, local artist Hamilton Glass led the Mending Walls Project, pairing local artists to create new works across the city.