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.
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 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.
The plaque was unveiled in 1916 to commemorate the original
campus of Richmond College.
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 25th 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.
The plaque on one of the Richmond College gateways that commemorates the founding of Sigma Phi Epsilon.
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 on the former Richmond
College campus was the fashionable Robins house (demolished 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
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