The Shockoe Examiner Blogging the History of Richmond, Virginia: Way Back Machine

Friday, March 5, 2010

Report on housing and living conditions in the neglected sections of Richmond, Virginia, 1913

[click for larger view]

Another neat find at the Way Back Machine was a title called "Report on housing and living conditions in the neglected sections of Richmond, Virginia (1913)." The report was prepared by Gustavus A. Weber, secretary for the Society for the Betterment of Housing and Living Conditions in Richmond. Weber was a prolific chronicler of social ills across the country and an advocate for better government. This report was published by Whittet & Shepperson of Richmond in 1913.

It was reports like this one on Richmond and Virginia social needs that led to the formation of a group of Richmond citizens to organize what became the Richmond School of Social Work and Public Health in 1917 - that school became Richmond Professional Institute (RPI) in 1939. RPI merged with the Medical College of Virginia in 1968 to become Virginia Commonwealth University.

- Ray B.

Directory of Business and Professional Women in Richmond, Virginia, 1921

Found this at the Way Back Machine. If you're interested in who the white women

(no African American women mentioned here) who were the movers and shakers in Richmond

in 1921 then check this resource out by just clicking on the image.
The advertisements are worth looking at too.

- Ray B.

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.