If you go back far enough, you could say Richmond began on a large, flat rock at the mouth of a creek that fed into the James River.
English settlers came up the river and traded with American Indians there on a rock the Indians called “Shockoe,” said David Napier, president of the Shockoe Bottom Neighborhood Association. “The name means ‘large, flat stone.’”
In fact, the rock, which may have been located in what is today’s Great Shiplock Park, gave its name to the creek (which ran down the valley between Church Hill and Shockoe Hill) as well as to the tobacco trading settlement that William Byrd I established on the low-lying land near the creek in the 1600s.
“The first buildings there were temporary, wood-framed structures,” said Chris Novelli, an architectural historian with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “The largest buildings were William Byrd’s tobacco warehouses. The houses were one or two rooms, and they weren’t built to last more than a generation.”
The area underwent a growth spurt in 1737 when Byrd’s son, William Byrd II, commissioned Major William Mayo to lay out a street grid for a new town to be called Richmond.
Mayo’s grid encompassed a 32-square-block area that coincides with the low-lying, southern section of present-day Shockoe Bottom. (The streets have been renamed over the years, but the original grid ran from today’s 17th Street to 25th Street.) “Shockoe Bottom is the oldest neighborhood in the city,” Napier said. “In fact, it was the city.”
Today, the neighborhood runs east from 14th Street to Pear Street, wraps around the base of Church Hill and climbs north from the river and runs a few blocks north of East Broad Street. “By 1742, Richmond was a village of 250,” Novelli said.
If you ask an informed Richmond native to describe Shockoe Bottom, he or she would probably mention the role industrialism played in shaping its history. As far back as the 1810s, it already had a mix of houses, stores, taverns and factories. (It also was home to a large slave trading center.)
The area wasn’t exclusively industrial, though.
“Once you had the Capitol building being built in the mid-1780s, the fashionable people started moving up Shockoe Hill to be near it,” Novelli said. “That was the beginning of Richmond’s westward development. But Shockoe Bottom was still largely residential into the Civil War.”
Shockoe Bottom’s oldest surviving house – the aptly named Old Stone House – was built in the 1700s, “and it’s the only Colonial-era house that survives in the city of Richmond,” Novelli said. (The structure, which now houses the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, is located at 1914-16 E. Main St.) While the house’s size and style were typical of the Colonial period, its stone building material “was highly unusual in Richmond at the time,” he added.
Some Shockoe Bottom houses built in the Federal style during the late 1700s and early 1800s survive as well. The Adam Craig House, located at 1812 E. Grace St., was built circa 1784, for example. But the majority of the buildings that stand in Shockoe Bottom today were built between 1870 and 1925. “The largest buildings are warehouses and factories,” Novelli said. “There’s a large component of early 20th-century industrial vernacular, but some also show an Art Deco influence.”
As the warehouses and factories fell into disuse, the area declined. Then it underwent a rebirth in the 1980s and early 1990s, first as an entertainment destination and then as a trendy residential area. Today, it’s one of the city’s fastest growing residential districts.
“The advent of the Federal Historic Tax Credit program in the mid-1980s has had the most profound impact on the area,” said Kerry Riley, a real estate agent with One South Realty Group. “That’s when it became financially feasible to renovate a century-old building into apartments, offices and retail spaces.”
The effect was like waving a green racing flag over the entire area.
“It was a mile’s worth of buildings from 14th Street to Pear Street, and it’s now going north of Broad Street,” Napier said.
Currently, developers in the area are responding to a high demand for rental units.
“However, I believe that some current apartment projects in old historic buildings could be converted into condos after the required five-year hold on tax credit deals expires and demand for ownership rises,” Riley said.
The neighborhood’s fine and casual dining options as well as its active nightlife attract many residents, as does its architecture and proximity to downtown Richmond, Napier said. “This is city living at its best.”
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