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Trudging Through The Past

Is Richmond’s history slowly fading away?

Last weekend I was forced, against my will, to participate in what I was told was a casual stroll through historic parts of downtown Richmond but what turned out to be an actual historic program called “Steps Toward Freedom: Lincoln's Walk in Richmond.”

Much like it sounds, the program was a walking tour of the route Abraham Lincoln took when he visited Richmond in April 1865, just after the city fell to the Union army.

The city was burning (or started burning when he got here), throngs of emancipated slaves threw themselves at Lincoln and the president had brought his 12-year-old son along for the journey.

This was all news to me.

Historic Richmond is not something that I know very much about. Dining districts, great little boutiques, unmonitored parking areas, dog-friendly parks … these are things I know about downtown Richmond. But the specifics of the city’s history … well, I never really caught the details.

Still, I love that Richmond has a rich, dynamic, exciting and, at times, sordid and controversial past. Even if I don’t know much about it.

So it was kind of exciting to retrace the steps of Abraham Lincoln and imagine what this city that I love might have looked like in the 19th century.

What I couldn’t escape on this tour, though, was the idea of Richmond as it was, as it could be and as it stands today.

The tour started at 17th and Dock streets at the Floodwall, just across from Bottom’s Up Pizza; this is the spot where Lincoln arrived in Richmond. As I stood apart from the crowd, trying not to absorb any actual historic information from the interpreter stationed there, I read a plaque about George Washington’s Richmond.

Washington dreamed of a country connected by a series of canals, one of which brought Lincoln into the city that day. A Richmond with plenty of waterways meant a lively riverbank. And it was: taverns, shops, merchants. There was life on the river.

Richmond burned the day Lincoln came to town and, 150 years later, standing downtown, I couldn’t help but wonder, where are those restaurants and shops on the river? We’ve had plenty of time to rebuild, so where is that River District that we’ve been promised and keep asking for?

The tour headed up 17th Street, toward the 17th Street Farmers’ Market, what was in Lincoln’s day the busiest shopping district (and spot) in all of Richmond. On the Sunday afternoon of the tour, part of the market was roped off by bright yellow caution tape. Other than the structure and the interpreter’s tale of 19th century life, there was no evidence that this was a market at all.

We hiked out of Shockoe Bottom, passed the remnants of Saturday night: beer bottles, empty packs of cigarettes, food containers. We tried to pretend we didn’t see the boarded up buildings, decaying For Lease signs and the homeless. My fellow tour-goers remarked that they were glad that tour wasn’t at night. A family in the group decided to move their car, fearful of leaving it unattended in the Bottom on a sunny afternoon.

At 14th and Franklin, Lincoln would have caught a view of a slave jail, we were told. It’s now a parking lot, which we could see, if it weren’t for the highway.

And then we got to Broad Street.

History was all around us on Broad Street, at least it had been, once upon a time. Broad Street, at MCV, is filled with tales of historic buildings and sites on which today sit classrooms, dorms and lecture halls. It’s a history that we today must imagine.

I couldn’t help but imagine that it would be so much better if those buildings were actually still standing.

We headed up 11th Street, toward Lincoln’s destination: The White House of the Confederacy. Today it’s the Museum of the Confederacy and if you’ve never seen it, as I hadn’t, it’s because the house has been almost entirely swallowed up by MCV.

Once you're there you can almost imagine life in the 19th century. Looking westward, down Clay, many of the period houses still stand. They’ve all managed to hold off VCU / MCV. For now.

On Lincoln’s trip, Jefferson Davis had already fled Richmond. Lincoln went inside The White House of the Confederacy and had a drink of water, which is important for some historic reason that I didn’t catch.

But Lincoln went inside that house, at that location, on an April day and I don’t exactly know why, but I know that it’s important that I got to see that house in that place. I also know that it’s important that others get to as well.

As I walked through my city that day, in a way that I never walk through my city, I couldn’t help but feel a sadness about it. I saw a Richmond littered with trash, bordered up and razed over. I saw out-of-towners and suburbanites look at this city, confused and slightly fearful; the way I look at our past.

I also saw all of Richmond’s potential: a merger of our past, our present and our future – a Richmond with canals, and river life, and history, and progress. It’s a Richmond that’s very possible and utterly within our reach.