The Shockoe ExaminerBlogging the History of Richmond, Virginia: Up & Down Church Hill: Images by Harris Stilson & Oral Histories from Church Hill, Shockoe, & Fulton.

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Up & Down Church Hill: Images by Harris Stilson & Oral Histories from Church Hill, Shockoe, & Fulton.

Kitty Snow's latest book on Richmond history is

available from Amazon and local book stores.

Older publications include:

From A Richmond Streetcar, is available

from Amazon, Dietz Press and local bookstores.

On The West Clay Line, is available from

Amazon, in local bookstores and in our online store.

Richmond's Kitty Snow has been busy the last few years researching, writing, and publishing books that use her great-grandfather's photographs to illustrate and document the life of ordinary Richmonders of the early 20th century. To learn more about Kitty, her great-grandfather, Harris Stilson, the streetcar motorman and photographer, visit this SITE.

On Kitty's website, Richmond In Sight, a new feature highlights images of bicycles in Richmond taken by Harris Stilson, seen here riding his grandson's bike.

- Ray

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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.