1965: A Death Under the Richmond Streets.

Visitors to Richmond’s Shockoe Valley have only a hint of what lies beneath the paving and cobblestones, the vacant lots, and the industrial wastelands north of Broad Street. The only indication is a series of large square drains on the floor of the valley. Many years ago, when this was a meadow between two hills, the rushing water of Shockoe Creek dominated the vista. Later, the creek was a constant problem for manufacturing and warehouses in the valley, flooding out of its banks and into basements and stores. Where Shockoe Creek once simply drained the watershed that splits the city, its path was finally channeled into a massive concrete tunnel that remains the central artery of Richmond’s wastewater system.

Sixty years ago, James Messner’s last day began fifteen feet below this manhole at the intersection of Patterson Avenue and Belmont Avenue.

That enormous channel under Shockoe Valley was to play an important part of what happened on July 15, 1965, although the weather forecast for the afternoon gave no hint of the horror to come. “Variable cloudiness with 30 percent chance of showers. High around 90,” reported the Times-Dispatch. The three Richmond City employees who stood in the middle of Patterson Avenue knew the hazard of sudden flooding in the sewers where they worked. Nevertheless, there didn’t seem to be much danger in either the forecast or the slightly cloudy sky above on that Thursday. Unknown to the three men, a violent summer rainstorm was building several miles away in the West End. James Messner, age 35, and Benny Whitlock, 47, descended on ropes to work on a new sewer connection to a nearby home. Leroy Tyler, 28, stayed at street level at Patterson and Belmont to keep an eye on traffic while passing down tools to the men fifteen feet below the surface in the sewer.

Installation of the sewer line under Patterson Avenue. This is the same 6’ pipeline where city workers were overtaken by water from a flash flood 41 years after this photo was taken. Richmond Times-Dispatch, Aug. 10, 1924.

 A rush of air from the manhole at Patterson and Belmont was probably the first indication that something was going terribly wrong. Tyler could hear an increasingly loud roaring noise followed by a wall of water that surged east down the sewer line under Patterson Avenue. Fifteen feet below where Tyler stood, Benny Whitlock was suddenly hit by the filthy water and managed to grab a rope dangling from the opening above. The force of the rushing water battered him against the curving walls, he lost his grip, and he was suddenly borne along down the concrete tube, now filled three-fourths to the ceiling. “The water was right up on them before they knew what hit them,” said the shocked supervisor of sewer maintenance. “This is the first time that anything like this has happened in the 40 years I’ve been here."

Whitlock was carried off in the darkness until he glimpsed another manhole opening in the ceiling of the sewer pipe and grabbed at it, managing a handhold. He was shocked by feeling Messner crash into him as he washed by in the darkness, almost causing Whitlock to lose his grip. He said he could hear Messner shouting as he was carried off into the terrifying, roaring, dark water, his voice growing more and more faint in the distance. Tyler, seeing everyone swept away by the water, ran to a nearby store and called the Richmond Fire Department. Firemen arrived and managed to get a thoroughly shaken Whitlock onto a ladder, out of the sewer, and up to the street. James Messner, however, was nowhere to be found.

A shaken Benny Whitlock stands, shivering and soaking wet, in Patterson Avenue after a desperate rescue from the sewer under the street. Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 16, 1965.

The firemen raced to the next manhole at Sheppard and Park Avenue, pulled the cover, and descended into the sewer. By that time the wall of water was already receding, making it easier to search for Messner with spotlights and to call out to him on megaphones. The firemen, wearing gas masks because of the danger of exposure to sewer gas, worked their way down Shepherd Street, opening manholes and descending, hoping to find that Messner had somehow resisted the rushing water and had found something to grab onto along the sewer as he swept by. They opened manholes all the way to where the sewer reached the next main in the 1100 block of Hermitage Road, and there it joined a mammoth tunnel that emptied into the river near 14^th Street.

A 1917 photograph from The Engineering News – Record, shows the scale of the massive main sewer line in the floor of Shockoe Valley before it was covered. The interior was 10 x 16 feet at this point and drained 12-1/2 square miles of the city before emptying into the James River at 14^th Street. In the background is the Marshall Street Viaduct (demolished 1970), which ran from downtown Richmond to Church Hill.

City workers in rowboats patrolled the opening of the sewer near the massive gates which prevented access from the riverbank. Divers searched the opening of the tunnel with the assumption that Messner’s body had been washed the entire length of the system. The search was called off at 9:00 PM because of darkness, to resume the next day.

James Messner’s body was found near here, in the shadow of the I-95 bridge.

Friday, the search continued with firemen again entering the sewer system, a tugboat searching the river below the city, and others dragging the river near the enormous sewer opening. Two volunteers in an outboard boat joined the search, and they were the ones who discovered Messner’s body in the James River, sprawled on a sandbar near what is now the I-95 bridge. He was three miles away from where he descended into the manhole at Patterson and Belmont. Messner was buried in the cemetery at Hebron Baptist Church in King William County, his Death Certificate specifying the cause of death: “Drowning - due to flash-flood in sewer.”

Messner’s sister Olive apparently paid for this grave marker in King William County, commemorating his manner of death. Photo by A.D. Sorrell on FindaGrave.com.

James Messner was a City of Richmond employee who died a dreadful, disorienting death, drowning while tumbling helplessly in the stinking black darkness below the streets. His sister noted on his grave marker he was “killed in the line of duty.” Richmond’s first responders are usually thought of as working in the most dangerous circumstances and occasionally being seriously injured in the course of their duties. While his is not a sacrifice of the kind characterized as “heroic,” Messner nevertheless did die while serving the people of Richmond. As recently as September 2023 a City of Richmond employee named Derrick Christian was crushed by a tree in Libby Hill Park. Christian, like James Messner, gave their lives improving this city where we live, and deserve to not be forgotten.

-Selden

Richmond, Va. from Manchester, rare postcard image published between 1901-1907

Rare view of Richmond from a postcard published between 1901 and 1907 when postcards were produced with "undived backs."

The text description on the reverse of the card reads:

"RICHMOND, VA. FROM MANCHESTER. Richmond is built upon seven eminences, the principal ones of which are Church and Shockoe Hills, and is surrounded by beautiful scenery. It is regularly laid out, the streets crossing at right angles; the business quarter shows many handsome buildings, while the residences are surrounded by picturesque grounds. Richmond is joined to Manchester by a bridge over the James River."

Manchester merged with Richmond in 1910. Learn more about postcard history and how to date them HERE. 

- Ray

 

"My Dinner with Andre" - filmed in Richmond in Dec. of 1980.

"My Dinner with Andre" was filmed over two weeks in December 1980 in the then-vacant Jefferson Hotel here in Richmond. If you'd like to know more about the film and its Richmond connections, you can read a wonderful article by Ed Slipek in Style Weekly from 2021. Ed had a big part in the making of the film. Watch the movie - it's available for free on YouTube. I saw it at the Biograph way back when and the dialogue just blew my mind.

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Dec. 12, 1980

- Ray

Richmond Murder & Mayhem: An Interview with author Selden Richardson

Listen to this interesting interview with Selden Richardson, co-editor of the Shockoe Examiner, who discusses his latest book, Richmond Murder and Mayhem, published last year. You can purchase the book at all local bookstores or online including Amazon.   Listen HERE.

Explore the dark side of the history of the River City… Richmond has a curious share of horrific accidents, coolly calculated slaughter, and incidents of implacable deceit in its history. Here, the wronged, the devious, and the heartbroken enact their lives on the stage set of the River City's ostensibly genteel neighborhoods, where a tree-shaded city street may have been the site of a crime of passion and an innocuous path in the woods recalls a grisly unsolved murder. Discover these and other lesser-known stories, from a young bride poisoned by her husband to the horrific fate of an entire airliner. Local historian Selden Richardson explores tales from a time when murder and mayhem stalked the streets of Richmond.

Selden Richardson is a local historian who writes and lectures about history and architecture in his native city of Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of Built by Blacks: African American Architecture and Neighborhoods in Richmond, Virginia (The History Press, 2008) and The Tri-State Gang in Richmond: Murder and Robbery in the Great Depression (The History Press, 2012).

From Paris, With Love -- The Classical Mementos of Richmond College

Boatwright is the name of the library at today’s University of Richmond, named for University President Frederic Boatwright. Because of that association, it was ironic that he was the one who seized an ax and smashed down the door of the library at Richmond College – but Dr. Boatwright was understandably in a hurry that night as the building was burning down around him.

Picture postcard showing Richmond College’s Ryland Hall before the 1910 fire.

At that time, the small Baptist school that would become today’s University of Richmond was located on a campus between Ryland and Lombardy streets that ran south to Franklin Street and north to Broad, interrupting the path of Grace Street. A blaze began on Christmas morning in 1910 in one of the wings of Ryland Hall, the principal building of Richmond College, causing considerable damage and threatening to engulf the entire four-story structure.

After Boatwright forced open the doors, dozens of students and volunteers from the neighborhood rushed in the college library and saved 15,000 books and all the school’s curios and museum items. Among these were “the highly prized mummy, the last remains of Thi-Ammong-Net, an Egyptian princess, who lived 3,000 years before Christ.” Students took the mummy to Dr. Boatwright’s house, gently tucked it under his Christmas tree for safekeeping, then returned to the blaze at the College. Saved from the flames, Thi-Ammong-Net remains in the collection of the University of Richmond to this day.

Frederic William Boatwright (1868-1951) from Find a Grave.com.

Although the loss of property was considerable and Ryland Hall was burned beyond repair, amazingly there was no loss of life. City Building Inspector Henry P. Beck, usually reviled for his dictatorial ways, received high praise for insisting on the installation of the metal fire escapes that allowed students to safely flee the fire.

Boatwright lost all of his books and papers in the conflagration and a safe in his office was found buried under smoldering debris in the basement. Perhaps because of the loss of the documentation of his professional life, the traumatic Christmas fire at Richmond College seems to have lodged in Boatwright’s imagination. Even six years after the fire, and with the challenges of establishing the school’s new facilities in Westhampton, Boatwright was still thinking about the old campus.

Section of the 1905 Sanborn fire insurance map of Richmond from the Library of Congress shows the eastern side of the Richmond College campus and Ryland Hall squarely in the path of Grace Street.

 

View looking east from the top of Ryland Hall from the 1906 Richmond College yearbook shows the entrance to the university grounds from the 1000 block of W. Grace Street.

In May of 1916, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that Boatwright received City permission to construct two “gateways” that would be erected on Grace Street at Ryland and Lombardy Streets. They would mark the location of the old Richmond College campus and honor its memory. He also had a good idea of the design he wanted: “The pilons, Dr. Boatwright said yesterday, will be practically replicas of those on the famous Alexander Memorial Bridge over the Seine River in Paris, which are said to be the finest work of that kind in the world.”

Pont Alexandre III, Paris, shown here during the Paris Exhibition,1900. From the “Museums of Paris” website.

A modern photo of the pylons of the Pont Alexandre III bridge in Paris. From Wikipedia.

Pont Alexandre III has been termed Paris’ most exuberant bridge design and was named for Tzar Alexander III of Russia, who signed the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1892. Designed to not interfere with the view up and down the Seine, the low, steel arch span was considered an engineering marvel when it was completed in 1900. The bridge is anchored on each end by two decorative, columned pylons. It isn’t known if Boatwright saw the bridge on a European trip, but views of the famously graceful French bridge certainly appeared in the press. 

The eastern pair of Dr. Boatwright’s pylons, at Ryland and West Grace Streets. The church on the right is Bethlehem Luthern Church which stands at 1100 West Grace Street.  

The western pair of Dr. Boatwright’s pylons, at Lombardy and West Grace Streets.

This was hardly the first time Richmonders looked to the Old World for an imposing design to copy, the most overt example being our State Capitol building with its classical sources. The pyramid in Hollywood Cemetery is an obvious reference to antiquity, but there are other examples. In the 1890s, a select City Hall committee was debating the form a memorial to Confederate soldiers and sailors might take. Richmond City Engineer Wilfred Cutshaw ended all discussion when he stated emphatically that the monument must take the form of a figure on the top of a single, Corinthian column. The memorial shaft was to be an almost exact copy of what is known as “Pompey’s Pillar,” still standing today in Alexandria, Egypt, only in Richmond’s version the column was topped with a statue of a Confederate soldier.

 

A comparison between Pompey’s Pillar (ca. 300 AD) and the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument (1895, demolished 2020).

Dr. Boatwright’s gateways were dedicated on June 6, 1916. “We regard it as a pious duty to mark this place where for eighty years our college has stood,” he told the crowd assembled on the corner of Ryland and Grace as the bronze plaque on the base was unveiled. In his address he also urged one of the school’s original structures, Haxall Hall (which still stands on the northeast corner of Grace and Lombardy), be reproduced on the Westhampton campus as a further memorial to the origins of the old Richmond College.

This plaque was unveiled in 1916 to commemorate the original campus of Richmond College. It was mounted on the southeast pylon facing Ryland. 

Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity added their own bronze plaque to the base of one of the eastern gateways, perhaps in 1926 when they had a national convention in Richmond to celebrate their 25^th anniversary. The fraternity was founded in 1901 by twelve students in Ryland Hall and moved with the rest of the school to the present location at the University of Richmond. Sigma Phi Epsilon now has more than two hundred chapters and 14,000 members across the world.

This plaque commemorates the founding of Sigma Phi Epsilon. It was mounted on northeast pylon facing Grace. 

The land originally occupied by Richmond College was considered valuable as it stood directly in the path of development in the city’s West End, so the ashes of Ryland Hall were hardly cold when speculation regarding the former campus appeared in print. In 1911, “a syndicate of capitalists” was assembled to make an offer on the property, even though it would be another year before contracts were signed to build two dormitories and a stadium to house Richmond College on its new campus west of the city. The wreckage of Ryland Hall was cleared away, streets and alleys were laid out across the old campus, and stylish new houses soon filled the space previously occupied by the college.

Among those new homes that were built near the former Richmond College campus was the fashionable Robins house (demolished in 1966) at 1603 West Grace Street, the scene of the murder of Walter Raleigh Robins in 1926. This house stood diagonally across Lombardy Street from the western pair of Boatwright’s gateways. You can read the Shockoe Examiner’s exploration of the Robins murder here:

Compared to the French originals, the gateways that mark the former Richmond College precincts are far from the “replicas” Boatwright envisioned, being less detailed and ornate. They also exhibit a more appropriate scale (and cost) for Richmond’s Grace Street, as opposed to framing a sweeping vista of the city of Paris. The Richmond gateways also substitute humble but pragmatic light fixtures for the gilded winged horses and flying nymphs of the Parisian model. The intriguing question of who designed the Richmond College memorial gates may be buried in Boatwright’s papers at the University of Richmond, but the gateways themselves still remain today just as he intended: a permanent memorial to the long-lost origins of the school Boatwright served his entire life.

 

-Selden