The Shockoe ExaminerBlogging the History of Richmond, Virginia: Shockoe Valley slums, 1913.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Shockoe Valley slums, 1913.

The mystery image from last week's post shows the slums in Shockoe Valley. And yes, that is the White House of the Confederacy at the top. This image is from Report on Housing and Living Conditions in the Neglected Sections of Richmond, Virginia, prepared by Gustavus A. Weber, secretary Society for the Betterment of Housing and Living conditions in Richmond. Published in 1913 by Whittet & Shepperson in Richmond. It is available in several Richmond area libraries and on Google Books. This area was called Butcher Town. More about Butcher Town in a future post.

This is how Gregg Kimball described this and other similar areas of the city:

Other images from the Report on Housing and Living Conditions in the Neglected Sections of Richmond, Virginia:

Check out the Report on Housing and Living Conditions.... in Richmond, 1913 HERE. It is full of images, graphs, and lots of data.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: I wonder what's there now; November 19, 2023 at 12:57 AM

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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.