The Shockoe ExaminerBlogging the History of Richmond, Virginia: Ginter House, 1891

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Ginter House, 1891

From Picturesque Richmond. Richmond, Virginia and Her Suburbs,

Richmond, Va., J.L. Hill Printing Company, 1891.

Ginter House, 901 W. Franklin St., corner of Shafer and W. Franklin Streets, was completed in 1892 for cigarette magnate Major Lewis Ginter (1824-1897), one of Virginia’s wealthiest men. Ginter was responsible for developing Richmond’s Ginter Park neighborhood and commissioning the Jefferson Hotel. The building, designed by architects Harvey L. Page and William Winthrop Kent, is one of Richmond's most architecturally significant structures and is considered the finest example of Richardsonian architecture in Virginia.

From 1924 through 1930, the former mansion served as home to the City of Richmond's first public library. The Richmond School of Social Work and Public Health (later Richmond Professional Institute - RPI) purchased the building in 1930, As the school grew (RPI became VCU in 1968), it became exclusively an administrative building for the offices of the provost, vice presidents, and other school officials.

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Contributors:

Ray Bonis:

Ray worked at VCU Libraries' James Branch Cabell Library from 1989 until 2021. He is the co-author of Virginia Commonwealth University (2006) and Greetings from Richmond (2009) - an architectural history of the city.

Selden Richardson:

Architectural historian and author of Built By Blacks: African American Architecture and Neighborhoods in Richmond, Virginia (2006), The Tri-State Gang in Richmond: Murder and Robbery in the Great Depression. (2012), and Richmond Murder & Mayhem (2023)

On History:

"The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today...The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow."
-- G. M. Trevelyan (1876-1962) from his "Autobiography of an Historian," An Autobiography and Other Essays (1949).

Key Dates in Richmond History
(more to follow)

1737 – William Mayo laid out the original street plan for the town of Richmond on land provided by William Byrd II.

1742 – Chartered as a town

1780 – Virginia’s state capital moved from Williamsburg to Richmond.

1782 – Incorporated as a city.

1788 - Virginia State Capitol building completed.

1860-1865 – Serves as capital of the Confederate States of America.

1910 - Manchester, the city located just south of the James, is consolidated with Richmond.

1949 - Oliver Hill (1907-2007) elected to City Council, first African American since Reconstruction.

1968 - Virginia Commonwealth University created by the merger of the Medical College of Virginia and Richmond Professional Institute.

1977 - Henry Marsh elected as first African American mayor of Richmond.

2009 – Shockoe Examiner founded.