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

 

Rare Beth Ahabah postcard image, postmarked 1916

 

Rare postcard view of Beth Ahabah Jewish Synagogue. I know of only four other postcard views of this building. You can find those images on the Rarely Seen Richmond online website that VCU Libraries hosts. This image is one I just downloaded from a rare book dealer website. I may purchase the original. 

The Synagogue of Congregation Beth Ahabah at 1121 W. Franklin Street was built in 1904 and designed by Noland and Baskervill. The neo-classical building’s dome recalls the Pantheon in Rome. The Synagogue contains twenty-nine stained glass windows including one depicting Mount Sinai created by the Louis C. Tiffany Studios in 1923. The reform Jewish congregation was founded in 1841. Beth Ahabah means House of Love. 

The reverse side of the postcard. Postmarked March 6, 1916.

-- Ray

Map of Richmond, 1871/1872 - published in the city directory.

The Richmond city directory of 1871/1872 (published in September of 1871) contained this map of Richmond. This image is from a copy of the directory held by the Special Collections and Archives department of the James Branch Cabell Library, VCU Libraries. 

Map of Richmond from the 1871/1872 Richmond city directory.

Email Ray if you would a larger digital copy of this map.

The 1871/1872 directory was published by "B. W. Gillis, Publisher," whose offices were located at 912 1/2 Main Street. B. W. Gillis' full name was Basanquet Wesley Gillis (1835-1915) and he was briefly editor of the Richmond State Journal. [The Library of Virginia's Virginia Chronicle site has a good description/history of the paper HERE,] Gillis' obituary can be viewed at the bottom of this blog entry. His firm also published the 1873/1874 Richmond city directory. 

Below are some sections of the map:

This section includes Capitol Square. 

The western edge of the city. A section of the area entitled Public Square would eventually morph into Monroe Park.

A legend on the top left of the map indicates the city's numerous church locations. 

Notice of the publication of the 1871/1872 Richmond city directory which appeared in the September 9, 1871 edition of the Richmond Dispatch.

Obituary of Basanquet Wesley Gillis from The Brooklyn Daily Times, April 14, 1915. 

The Shockoe Examiner will publish other 19th-century Richmond city maps in future posts. 

- Ray

We're back from our vacation and ready to report our latest findings on Richmond history.

The old overhead fluorescent light fixtures came on with a sizzling sound when we threw the big breaker on the wall of the Shockoe Examiner editorial and production facilities.  After a minute, laptop screens flickered to life around the room, the massive teletype machine in the back gave a couple of chugs, and a hot smell in the air signaled the coffee maker ran dry months ago and was getting ready to burn the place down.  Sabbatical is over, and the Shockoe Examiner is back on task.

One of the first things to attend to is our correspondence, bulging our email account and piling up like snow under the mail slot under the frosted glass window of the Shockoe Examiner front door.  Many thanks to everyone who wished us well and said they were looking forward to the blog’s return.  I assure you every message is read and appreciated.

So, under the leadership of the SE Editor, Ray, the rest of the staff clatters down the stairs and out into the streets of Richmond, eager to ferret out the most exquisitely obscure history bits still running around loose in this town for our loyal readers.  The Shockoe Examiner is back, and the game is on.

 Selden

The Shockoe Examiner Revisits the Booth Home, Then Goes on Holiday

This time of year, when Richmond is at its hottest, the offices of The Shockoe Examiner are deserted.  The sun still shines through the tall, dusty windows that overlook the leafy expanse of Monroe Park. However, the electric fans on the ceiling are still, the inboxes are piled high with comments from our many excited and engaged readers, and the once-busy phones that usually bring a firehose of tips, praise, threats, and derision are silent.  The story of Richmond marches on, but the staff who man these desks in this large, dusty room and who gleefully scrape the bottom of the Richmond history bucket for readers of The Shockoe Examiner are going to take a short holiday.

We have one update to offer: a historic site in Richmond and the birthplace of thousands of Richmonders has been wiped from the city map.  

The Booth Home and Hospital for unwed mothers at 2710 Fifth Avenue has been demolished and in its place is a new owner is constructing “Chestnut Flats,” a group of twelve condominiums priced at more than $400,000 each.  Promotional material for the project describes the design scheme as “This contemporary take on a classic Scandinavian chalet is artfully blended with the saltbox style found in the surrounding neighborhood.”

The ”Chestnut Flats” condominium project under construction on the site of the Booth Home on Fifth Avenue.

Whoever wrote that description clearly never visited Highland Park and their description of rows of neat, New England saltbox houses in the area (let alone how Scandinavian chalets might somehow blend with the existing neighborhood) betrays that lack of knowledge. 

Walking the construction site, bits of bricks from the previous buildings litter the ground and pulverized shards of window glass glitter in the sun like tiny fragments of memory.  William Faulkner wrote of layering myth and memory and geography in his descriptions of the Mississippi landscape his characters populated, and the site of the Booth Home seems, beneath its crust of wannabe Scandinavian chalets, a place where these things might still intersect. 

So much joy, so much anguish, so many tears in the buildings that once were here – you can’t but think all this emotion was not contained in the rooms and halls of the Booth Home but instead must have somehow permeated the very ground.  It is similar to the uneasy feeling produced by a visit to the blank city blocks that were the burying ground and slave jails below Church Hill – only there on that now-quiet and anguished landscape it was human tears and sweat and blood that forever stained the floor of Shockoe Valley.

The Booth Home is gone, but its story can be revisited here at The Shockoe Examiner, and we invite a rereading of the history of this place and your thoughts about the geographic persistence of memory, and joy, and sadness. 

The “Chestnut Flats” are just another, albeit unattractive, layer to the onion that is Richmond's history.  Stay tuned as The Shockoe Examiner peels back more layers, other history, and curious events in the long and storied tale that is Richmond, Virginia.

See you in a few weeks.

Ray and Selden