The Shockoe Examiner Blogging the History of Richmond, Virginia: A Shockoe Examiner Sampler - Read some of our Favorite Posts on Richmond, Virginia History

Below are eight samples of the kinds of Richmond, Virginia history stories we feature on the Shockoe Examiner - four each from this blog's editors, Ray Bonis and Selden Richardson. They are among the 200 or so blog entries that make up this website. Click on the link to access the blog entries.

Found! The Architect and Contractors for Queen Anne Row, 200 Block of West Main St., built 1890, Richmond, VA

Shot for a Cigarette – A Sudden Death in Monroe Street

Ginter House, built 1888-1892, the Richardsonian Romanesque Jewell of Richmond, Virginia - An Architectural History

Evangeline Booth Home and Hospital, 2710 Fifth Ave.

Willie, the Six Year Old Richmond Newsboy, and thePhotographs of Lewis W. Hine, June 8, 1911.

Did He Fall or Did He Jump? A visitor from North Carolina meets a horrid fate at City Hall

Washington Monument in Monroe Park, 1871-1883

You wouldn’t do this for such a little thing, would you?” The Murder of Walter Raleigh Robins, 1926.

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.

The Shockoe Examiner
Blogging the History of Richmond, Virginia

Thursday, November 6, 2025

A Shockoe Examiner Sampler - Read some of our Favorite Posts on Richmond, Virginia History

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