Bob Dylan, The Mosque, Richmond, Virginia - 1966?

I think this poster is for his 1966 concert at the Mosque in Richmond - I'll check the newspapers on microfilm from this time to double check. Maybe there will be a review.

- Ray

Wickham statue, Monroe Park, 1895.

"Soldier, Statesman, Patriot, Friend" is how Confederate General Williams Carter Wickham (1820-1888) is described in the words on the base of the pedestal that holds the statue to him. After a distinguished career in the Confederate Army, he aligned himself with the Republican Party in Virginia. He served as president of Virginia Central Railroad Company and later the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company. Unveiled October 29, 1891, the statue was designed by Richmond sculptor Edward V. Valentine (1838-1930) who would later live in Monroe Terrace Apartments (now VCU's Johnson Hall) directly across the street from the park and the statue. In the early 1980s, a friend of mine and I would often sit ourselves on the bench in front of the statue after a wonderful meal at the old VCU Hibbs cafeteria. My friend called it "Wickhamizing." Click on this 1895 image for a larger view.

- Ray.

Monroe Park, little girls enjoying the day, ca. 1910

A friend gave me these images some years ago. That's the 600 block of West Franklin St. in the back ground (a closer look and you can see a bit of the 500 block too). The image of the two girls sitting on the curb is of them on Linden Street. I am really not sure of the date but 1910 or a tad before seems about right.  Click on the image for a larger view.

- Ray.

Paperweight With a Past

For centuries, open windows, later combined with electric fans (if you were lucky) were all that saved working America from the heat of summer.  Before the relief of air conditioning, the humble paperweight is now mostly a curiosity and a decorative item, but it was once as important and common a desk accessory as staplers and post-it notes are now.  The nature of the desk paperweight demanded it be displayed on the top of piled papers and files, so it made an ideal vehicle for advertising and keeping the name of a product or company prominently displayed in the foreground of the landscape of a desk.

Click on images twice for a much larger view.

 

No doubt this is what the principals of the Old Dominion Building & Loan Association were thinking when they commissioned these bronze paperweights in the 1890s.  Low and heavy and with a small knob on the top to easily grasp the paperweight, it has the name of the company and its location in Richmond deeply cast into the top as a prominent reminder of the Building & Loan Company’s services.

This particular paperweight has special significance for Richmond history, as an inscription on the bottom distinguishes this otherwise unremarkable desk accessory.  It ties it to the creation of one of the city’s most prominent landmarks.  Scars in the metal show that at one point it was used as a hammer, but the words on the bottom are still legible:

“Cast by the Henry Bonnard Bronze Co. N.Y. 1894 from metal used in the colossal statue for the Confederate Soldiers’ & Sailors’ Monument Richmond VA.”

Louise Gurkin Adamson described the creation of the elegant column and bronze statue that stands in Libby Hill in Richmond in a 1994 article in Virginia Cavalcade magazine.  She recounted the debate over the design of the monument, which was finally settled by the domineering City Engineer, Wilfred Cutshaw.  It was Cutshaw who argued that the only appropriate model for this monument was Pompey’s Column, built in 297 A.D. by the Romans and which still stands outside Alexandria, Egypt.  A former Confederate named Anthony M. Keiley worked in Cairo, so he was contacted and provided measurements of the Egyptian prototype.  The Richmond monument is an almost exact copy, just as Cutshaw demanded.

One of the City Engineer’s friends and admirers was CarltonMcCarthy, a Richmond businessman, politician and promoter.  McCarthy, born in 1847, was too young to have served in the military, although he lost an older brother killed at the battle of Cold Harbor.  McCarthy saw the ruins of the former Confederate capitol as rife with potential, and constantly promoted the city and such civic causes as public libraries, the battle against tuberculosis, an expanded police force, and underground utilities.  His promotion of the interests of Richmonders extended to his professional life, also, as he was one of the principals of the Old Dominion Building & Loan Association, the business that produced the bronze paperweight.  The company, described in an 1893 publication, “…is the well-tried building fund plan, pure and simple, without any of the questionable attachments of insurance, banking or speculation.”  The company also enjoyed the added caché of the Mayor of Richmond, J. Taylor Ellyson, serving as President of Old Dominion Building & Loan. McCarthy himself would later serve as Richmond Mayor from 1904 to1908. 

McCarthy’s interest in the public good extended to the memory and monuments of the Confederacy and how they could decorate the streetscape of Richmond.  He served on the design committee for what would become known as the Confederate Soldiers’ and Sailors’ monument, and helped raise money for it from, among other things, sales of his reminisces of wartime Richmond when he was a boy.  After considerable delay, the commission for the bronze statue of a Confederate soldier on the top of the monument went to Richmond artist William Ludwell Sheppard.

There were several connections between McCarthy and Sheppard, whose drawings had been used to illustrate McCarthy’s popular account of what he termed a “boy soldier.”  Sheppard also created the statue of A. P. Hill for the monument over the General’s grave on Laburnum Avenue.  Indeed, McCarthy had only to look out the front door of his home at 206 North Harrison Street to see Sheppard’s statue of a cannoneer Sheppard sculpted for the 1892 Richmond Howitzers monument. 

The bronze statue for the new monument at the southern terminus of 29^th Street was cast in New York and reached Richmond on May 5, 1894.  Presumably this is when the paperweights were also shipped to the Old Dominion Building & Loan Association.  It isn’t known how many paperweights were cast from the same bronze, but it was certainly fitting that McCarthy’s company was able to promote themselves by association with this Richmond landmark.

The statue was unveiled on May 30, 1894, and it was estimated that a crowd of a hundred thousand people watched a parade two miles long in celebration of the unveiling.  Among the dignitaries were Carlton McCarthy and Wilfred Cutshaw, who must have watched the uncovering of the large bronze of the Confederate soldier with quiet satisfaction. Perhaps members of the design committee who had worked on the project were given Old Dominion Savings & Loan paperweights to mark the occasion and completion of a task they had been working on for five years.

Carlton McCarthy no doubt owned one of these paperweights and probably had it on his desk at the office of the Old Dominion Building & Loan Association, located in the heart of Richmond’s business district at 1115 East Main Street.  Perhaps during the business day he occasionally hefted it in his hand and recalled the long and tiresome process of bringing the monument to fruition.  Emerging onto the sidewalk in front of his business, McCarthy could have looked up the street to his right and had the satisfaction of seeing the tall column with its statue of the watchful soldier at the top of the Confederate Soldiers’ and Sailors’ monument silhouetted against the eastern sky.  The northern face of the bottom of the monument is precisely aligned with the center of Main Street, an exactitude that is surly the work of Cutshaw, the meticulous City Engineer. 

The paperweight created more than a hundred ten years ago still performs its single-minded design, but more importantly still records its association with one of Richmond’s most dramatic monuments. In its fabric the humble paperweight also uniquely recalls the cooperation between artist, engineer, businessmen and civic boosters that created the column at the lofty brink of Richmond’s Libby Hill.

-- Selden.

VCU Campus, 1971.

Great aerial view of the VCU "Academic" Campus (now called the Monore Park Campus) from 1971. At this time, the James Branch Cabell Library was just one story tall. The library is about to get a large addition and an amazing make-over.  Work on what is now Harris Hall is underway in this image (the building was known as the Business Building for decades). The houses on Park Ave. and where the VCU Student Commons is now are still extant in this image.  VCU has certainly demolished A LOT of buildings over the years. 

Click on the image twice to get a larger view.

Gabriel's Conspiracy: Exploring the Richmond Slave Rebellion of 1800, panel descussion, Wed. March 13, 7pm, VCU

In 1800, a literate slave known as Gabriel planned a rebellion that was to involve a march into Richmond. Although the action was suppressed, it confirmed the growing outcry for justice and the volatility of the slave economy.

VCU Libraries will host "Gabriel's Conspiracy: Exploring the Richmond Slave Rebellion of 1800" on Wednesday, March 13 at 7 p.m. in the W.E. Singleton Center for the Performing Arts, 922 Park Ave.

The event will feature two prominent experts on the subject of Gabriel's Rebellion, discussing this landmark in Virginia history: Dr. Michael Nicholls, professor emeritus of history at Utah State University and author of "Whispers of Rebellion: Narrating Gabriel's Conspiracy," and Dr. Philip J. Schwarz, professor emeritus of history at VCU and author of "Gabriel's Conspiracy: A Document History." 

These two books, "Whispers of Rebellion" and "Gabriel's Conspiracy," both published in 2012 by the University of Virginia Press, aim to present a complete account of the rebellion and will be available for sale at the event.

Event registration: http://www.library.vcu.edu/events/gabriel/

This event is in partnership with the Year of Freedom Committee, the VCU Department of History, the VCU Department of African American Studies and the Library of Virginia, which is also hosting a related lecture at noon on March 13 at the library, 800 E. Broad St. Details:

"Pinning Gabriel's Rebellion"

Wednesday, March 13 

Noon-1:00 PM

Lecture Hall, Library of Virginia

Using the new website HistoryPin historians Gregg Kimball and authors Nicholls and Schwarz will trace the activities and events leading up to the best-planned--and potentially most damaging--slave insurrection in Virginia. The region's geography and the library's documents are merged on the website to graphically depict the actions and aftermath of the Henrico bondsman. This program is presented in partnership with VCU Libraries.

Contact Ray Bonis if you have questions about the event.

Did He Fall or Did He Jump? A visitor from North Carolina meets a horrid fate at City Hall (repost with new image and WTVR's look at the story).

A post by Selden from some years back on the Shockoe Examiner inspired the folks at WTVR, Channel Six in Richmond, to look further into the story - what they call "The haunting tale of the bent fence." - aired on the 14th of Feb., 2013.

Below is the original post with one New image showing the last view that the banker saw before he jumped from Old City Hall to his demise on the fence below.

=============

When “A History of the Government of the City of Richmond” was published in 1899, the building we now know as Old City Hall had been completed only five years before. This otherwise relentlessly cheerful account of Richmond’s civil servants and the building they occupied noted only two dark days in the life of the young City Hall.  One was when A. P. Shield (“a well-known citizen of Richmond”) pulled a pistol from his pocket and shot himself through the head in a room on the second floor.  The other was the dramatic death on August 23, 1894, of Colonel J. M. Winstead of Winston, North Carolina, who fell from the balcony of the City Hall clock tower.  Winstead was impaled on the spiked cast iron fence below, “from which he was removed with great difficulty” in the delicate phrase of the 1899 publication.

[Read the newspaper account from the August 24, 1894

issue of the  Richmond Times, from the Chronicling America site]

 

Richmond City Hall, pictured around the time of Winstead’s fall.  The balcony he fell from is on the left hand side of the clock tower, above the roofline of the main building.

(click for much larger view)

The Richmond newspapers reported passersby gathering at the northwest corner of the City Hall and speculating what caused Winsted’s 94-foot drop from the glassed-in observation area below the clock.  One newspaper consulted a civil engineer, who stated quite positively that had Winsted jumped, he would have landed on the Broad Street sidewalk and not fallen straight down onto the fencing.

Willie Dunsford, who was standing on the corner of Tenth and Broad streets, happened to look up at the clock tower and provided the most exact description of Winstead’s end to a Richmond Dispatch reporter.  Dunsford said he saw Winstead discard shoes, hat and cane, “then stand up on the railing of the balcony, bend over a little, and jump off headlong toward the ground.” No matter what caused it, witnesses to the aftermath who happened to be on Broad Street that day all agreed they would never forget “the disheartening sight” of Col. Winstead’s gory end on the cast iron fencing of City Hall.

Many people were drawn by a macabre compulsion to gain access to the “observation cupola” the next day.  City Hall Superintendent Thompson closed the space to visitors, including one man firmly turned away by Janitor Lawrence Haake.   “He did look like an insane person,” recalled Haake,” and “he walked away apparently much dissatisfied.”  Stylishly dressed ladies, a visitor to Richmond staying next door at Ford’s Hotel, and the apparently insane were all treated alike and firmly turned away from the scene of the tragedy.  

 A modern view of the interior of the “observation cupola” of Old

City Hall.  Winstead fell from the balcony outside the glass on the right.

(click for larger view)

The last thing Winsted saw. 


--
 

While the lurid debate raged in Richmond as to motives and causes for the incident, Winsted’s mangled remains were returned to North Carolina and his funeral was held the evening after the day of his fall.  “An immense crowd of all classes” attended the service at Greensboro’s Green Hill cemetery.  His friends at the funeral loyally maintained that Winstead’s hat blew off, and it was his attempt to catch his hat, not suicide, that caused his death.

The bent spear points of the decorative cast-iron fence below the clock

tower on the Broad Street side still show evidence of Winstead’s fall.

The reason for Col. Winstead’s dramatic end, be it vertigo, self-destruction, leaning too far over the low balcony, or a chance gust of wind, will never be known.  The intervening 116 years since Winstead made his way up to the City Hall clock tower has made this once sensational and very public death the tiniest of footnotes in Richmond’s long history.  Nevertheless, the bent tines of the cast-iron railing where Winstead’s body was removed “with great difficulty” remain today as mute witness to a morning’s violence on Broad Street, and the dramatic end of the visitor from North Carolina.

- Selden R.

Firehouse Theatre - Then and Now. I prefer Then.