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A little city, a little history, a little about today
The first permanant English settlement in North America was at Jamestown in 1607, about 50 miles as the crow flies, down the river, now known as the James, from the "fall line". Lots of crows do fly around here and more and more bald eagles and blue herron can be seen as DDT fades to a memory and more obscure habitats shrink. Small mouth bass swim a longer distance to Jamestown than the crows fly, as the river twists and turns through Tidewater Virginia to release itself into the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. When the settlers arrived sturgeon eight feet (2.5m.) long still swam up river. Folklore has it that the Native Americans used to ride them as a right of passage. There aren't many Natives left around anymore. Those that are still here have melded into other cultures, Christian, European, African-American. Richmond was home to the Powatan. They were here when, a few weeks after landing in Jamestown, the English sailed up to the falls, as far as there ship could travel, to what is now Richmond. A permanant European settlement and trading post probably wasn't established here until the mid 1600's. By that time slaves from Africa had been here in Virginia for a quarter century. The Natives were dissapearing, mostly from the new deseases, but also driven out and slaughtered by the English and their allied Natives (who did a fair amount of slaughtering before white settlement).
Tobacco, and corn were grown to great profit to the privlidged whites. Most of the Europeans were indentured servants who worked along side the slaves for freedom. Freed slaves lived among the whites until some early 1700's proclamations ended hope of new freedoms until after the Civil War.
By the mid 1700's Richmond was coming into its own as a town. Officially founded in 1742. As settlers moved West, Richmond prospered in the tobacco and fur trades, and flour milling. The largest port in what was then the Western part of the colonies. The French Huguenots settled in the mid 1700's to the south side of the James, where the first coal and gold mining in North America became profitable.
In 1775 Patrick Henry, American Patriot (and slave owner), declared from St.John's Church, "but as for me, give me liberty or give me death". This by many accounts, set the stage for the American Revolution, for which Virginia, and in that, to a small degree Richmond), played a crucial role.
The state capitol was moved here from Williamsburg in 1780. The government was soon to flee West as Cornwallis and Benedict Arnold raided the capiol and burned much of the city. Shortly there after, Cornwallis was soundly defeated by French Forces with American aid at Yorktown.
Ambassodor to France, former Governor (the one who fled West), future president,Thomas Jefferson, designed the new Capitol, completed in 1788.
Richmond has grown and prospered as one of the trading, banking, manufacturing and commercial power houses of the Southern US.
1861 brought Civil War to Richmond. Virginia was the last southern state to join, albeit reluctantly. It split the state in two, the western half, being men who owned few slaves.
Richmond was the Capitol of the Confederate States of America for about four years. Richmond was home to the principle Confederate ironworks. Belle Isle was used as a prison camp for Union soldiers, many who died from starvation and desease before...1865, soldiers from the North broke through the eastern defences. In the flight and fright, warehouses were intentionally burned by the fleeing Confederates. The fires went out of control and much of Richmond burned, including the commercial and manufacturing districts of the city.
A few days later, Abraham Lincoln landed at Rocketts, the port, and liberated the city in a triumphant march of soldiers and freed blacks they paraded up Main Street.
True freedom was short lived for Richmonds blacks. For about five years after the war, blacks dominated the politics of the city as southern whites, who lost voting privilidge, looked on. When the white men regained there suffrage, the age of black oppression began. With establishment of the Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth century, blacks were little more than porrly paid working pawns of the white establishment. Integration was not established, and all of the Jim Crow laws were not repealed until the 1960's.
While Richmond continued to grow and prosper during the 20th cent., the industries that have made it so have changed. Tobacco was Richmond's largest employer until only a few years ago. Service industries have begun to eclipse manufacturing, as has happened in much of the US. Capitol One, a credit card company, now has more employees than Phillip Morris tobacco (8000+/- vs. 5000+/-). Although high tech manufacturing has brought Infineon Technologies, a German simiconductor manufacturing facility which opened just a few years ago. It now employs over 1700 workers.
Richmond has a diverse economic base, allowing us to weather the bad times a little better that many other US cities.
We have a population that is changing rapidly. For most of the life of the city we were black and white, european and african. Now large populations of Latinos and Southeast Asians have become an identifiable feature in our urban landscape.
Richmond is becoming cooler and cooler. And I love it.
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