BATTERSEA: THE GROWTH OF A PETERSBURG NEIGHBORHOOD

The historic buildings and streets that make up the Battersea Neighborhood form a homogenous streetscape. The neighborhood fabric in historic Petersburg, Virginia results from the accumulation of thousands of decisions on the part of city officials, developers, contractors, original owners, and subsequent occupants over more than three hundred years. These districts have resembled living organisms, adapting to dramatically changing conditions with grace and even beauty. While a few buildings, like John Bannister's Battersea villa, are singled out for their architectural design and detailing, the vast majority take part in a collective design tradition shared and understood between their builders and their users. The usual stylistic distinctions never made more than superficial inroads.  These structures share certain similarities that make them recognizable as having been built in Petersburg, even though they share features with houses in other parts of Virginia and the nation. 

Map of Petersburg's growth through 1820 showing Pride's Field/Battersea
to the left. Battersea villa is shown at the upper left.
[Gibson Worsham and Dolly Holmes for StudioAmmons]

Overview of Petersburg's Urban History

The basic building of the Virginia town, including Petersburg, until well into the nineteenth century, was the store with a residence next to or above for the proprietor, his family, his assistants, and his slaves. The value of land for commercial use led to a gradually intensifying use of the land lining the principal routes along and across the river with these store/dwellings. Urban Petersburg began as a series of unconnected trading villages (Old Peterburg, Blandford, and Pocahontas). The gradual infilling of the town’s grid took many years, as commercial firms, civic institutions, service functions, and professions multiplied. As space became more valuable, commercial and service buildings spread to secondary streets. The construction and placement of these basic buildings were governed by the grammar of regional vernacular architecture and by setback rules established by the government to ensure regularity and safety.

Downtown Petersburg from the air

Houses of workers, industries, and public servants lined secondary streets and the main street outside the commercial zone. Some of these houses were also built by developers in pairs or longer rows. While these arrangements economized on space and material, the choice to build uniform multi-family buildings was deeply rooted in European urban tradition.  As the commercial nucleus grew in scale the edge dwellings were replaced with more store/dwellings and new residential areas created on the edge.  Public buildings were placed in significant locations above and beyond the rules governing the placement of basic buildings. After the disastrous fire of 1816, the city center was rebuilt almost entirely in brick, and the new buildings, often built by developers in blocks of two or three, tended to link together to form continuous walls of stores along the sides of the main streets, with craftsmen and store owners still living above their businesses.  Residential building in the “suburbs” continued to be built in wood. 

Two-story double house from the late nineteenth century.

A specific building type, the double house, became the basic building block in the piecemeal expansion of Petersburg in the middle of the nineteenth century. Double houses were often built in groups and leased or sold to increasingly prosperous citizens at all levels of wealth. Building paired dwellings meant savings in material, since central chimneys and party walls could be shared. The consistency of form and closeness of contact also said a great deal about the community’s approach to civic life.  

Similarly, the way that the residents of Petersburg designed their neighborhoods, placed their buildings on the lots, and ornamented their streets developed over time. For many years, the city made no effort to pave streets or provide sidewalks, which were the responsibility of the property owner. Beginning in 1813 the state gave the city authority to charge citizens for the paving of certain streets. Over time, the city assumed responsibility for providing paved streets, street lighting, utilities, street trees, and even sidewalks, although many areas still lack fully paved walks in some areas. The way that streets and lots were organized became more uniform. The codification of the responsibilities of the city and the residents resulted in an improvement in the health and well-being of the residents and the beauty and order of their environment.     

Detail of copy of 1830 plat of Pride’s Field Plat of 1830 (Petersburg Clerk's Office)

The History of the Neighborhood

The Pride’s Field tract between New Town and Battersea was laid out in lots as part of a speculative suburban development on the high ground around Petersburg. Major Peter Jones sold his 140-acre share of the Abraham Wood grant to entrepreneur William Pride in 1745. Pride developed a mill and ferry at the Narrow Falls on the Appomattox River. Pride’s Field was the site of a famous race track, opened before 1766, one of four tracks that served as important recreational venues for the local population during the period just before the American Revolution. 

Detail, Plat of Pride’s Field, 1830 (Petersburg Clerk's Office)

The land was acquired between 1807 and 1810 from Pride’s grand-children and laid out in 1810 by a group of four developers. This speculative extension of the city responded to the construction of the Upper Appomattox Canal, a five and one-half mile waterway that brought goods around the falls of the river to a basin near the end of High Street. The canal was planned in 1795 and completed in 1816. Produce, mostly tobacco, was unloaded at the basin and carted into the city. The redrawn plat of 1830 shows a large “company’s square” occupying all the land between Dunlop and South streets and West High and Commerce streets, with a rectangular basin for the unloading of boats in the center. 

Detail, Beers Map, 1879

Detail of same two blocks shown above from, Sanborn Map, 1908. Shows change on these two blocks from 1879 to 1908.

The tract was not platted until 1830, although streets were laid out much earlier. The layout was made up of long, single rows of half-acre lots placed between closely spaced streets. As was typical of late eighteenth-century Petersburg subdivisions, the lots measure 100 feet wide by 217 feet deep. As the area developed as a working-class neighborhood, the lots were not only subdivided into narrower strips but were gradually divided down the middle so that houses eventually faced in each direction.

Canal Basin shown on 1879 Beers Map. Note the mills downstream from the basin and the small double houses nearby.

The canal extended in a seventy-five-foot right-of-way down the middle of Upper Appomattox Street. West Street, north of the canal, served as the access from Cox Road to the east-west streets, although the main bridge over the canal was on Dunlop Street. The earliest residences were intended for industrial and other workers and were grouped near the mills and the canal basin. They appear to date from the 1830s to the 1850s. A developer would buy several hundred-foot wide lots and create a miniature subdivision of tiny one-sixteenth-acre lots. 

Antebellum double house at 985 Commerce Street

On these would be built one-story two-room houses or double houses like the surviving structure at 985 Commerce. It consists of two one-room dwellings with integral sheds at the rear, sharing two chimneys placed along the party wall. A bedroom was provided in a garret lit by dormers and reached by a narrow corner stair. The house is similar to several double houses constructed on nearby Back Street. Physical evidence indicates that most double houses were converted for use by a single family by the second quarter of the twentieth century or earlier. The association of groups of two to four double houses with single owners suggests that they were all rental property housing workers tied to the local industry or canal. 

Map of Expansion of the western suburbs after 1830
[Gibson Worsham and Dolly Holmes for StudioAmmons]

Additional sections were added to the neighborhood at the west end during the mid- to late nineteenth century. The street grid was extended as far at Battersea Lane. The entire neighborhood was speculative, and like many of its kind it did not meet any strong need for housing at the time and took many decades to fill up. Wealthy mill owners and others acquired multiple lots on West High Street for large houses and gardens like the frame house at 827 West High Street. These lots were not subdivided for new housing until the late nineteenth century or later.

Early twentieth century houses

The progress of residential building is clear from the age of buildings along the streets. Aside from the pre-Civil War buildings sprinkled through the district, the oldest dwellings date from the 1870s and tend to be located in greater numbers to the eastern end of the district. Only along Washington Street were substantial numbers of the houses demolished to build newer dwellings as Washington became a fashionable address in the first years of the twentieth century. A few houses, mostly on Washington, were built of brick and/or utilized fully realized versions of nationally popular house forms such as the Bungalow and the American Foursquare. Most of the neighborhood’s houses embodied important aspects of the “double tenement” row house as developed in Petersburg, even as they incorporated decorative and organizational aspects of the national "styles."

As the city progressively developed in the post-Civil War years, the dominant building type became the two-story house, usually combined in a double form. These straddled a central lot line to create matching front and back yards, often with corresponding outbuildings. The mature double house, with a wide front porch, four or six opening on the front, and often an integral shed across the rear, increasingly lined the western sections of the neighborhood and remains the most common building type throughout the neighborhood. The house is found in two forms: the wider version utilizing the double-pile, side-passage plan, in which an entrance hall inside the front door contains the stair, and the narrower, double-pile, single-cell plan, in which the stair is located in the main room. Individual houses of each type were identified as belonging to one of three scale levels: small, medium, or large

View west on Washington Street

Washington Street, connected across the south side of Petersburg in the early nineteenth century and one of the principal routes through the city, was provided with several corner stores by the turn of the twentieth century, providing neighborhood residents with a nearby source of necessary goods and services. Like the commercial buildings in the city center, some of these housed the owner’s family upstairs. 

Birds eye view of the neighborhood today. The central industrial spine divides
it into two residential sections. 

 Post-War Growth and Twentieth-Century Changes 

As the city developed, so did the concept of street infrastructure. Some features of the neighborhood evolved by common understanding and others were regulated by ordinance. Streets were 60 feet wide and by the early twentieth century were lined with concrete curbs and concrete driveway entrances off the street to the rear of most lots. There are few, if any, alleys. While public water, fire hydrants, and gas were provided, there were no storm sewers. Streetlights were rare in the suburbs until well into the twentieth century and were likely incandescent teardrop-shaped lights suspended by cables over the most active intersections. By the third quarter of the  century brighter mercury- or sodium-vapor lights were attached to wooden poles at intervals along the streets. 

Lot layout in Battersea (Andrew Marshall for StudioAmmons)

The building setback in Battersea was usually twenty-four feet from the curb. The sidewalks were five feet wide and placed against the lot line and/or fence. Sidewalks were separated in most locations from the street by a planting strip. There is no evidence that the street were ever planted with street trees but were, instead irregularly shaded by trees placed within individual lots. 

The areas in front of each house were often fenced and planted with some sort of ornamental landscaping. By the early twentieth century, residential neighborhoods in the city were provided, in most cases, with sidewalks and paved streets. Narrow concrete walks led from the sidewalk to the house. Domestic outbuildings, consisting, among others, of henhouses, woodsheds, and storage buildings, were placed in the private yard to the rear. As automobiles became widespread, those who could afford them often erected small garages to the rear of their houses.

Battersea has suffered the loss of a considerable part of its traditional building fabric. Adverse economic and demographic conditions have resulted in the gradual decay of many others. In site of this, the city’s historic significance and the enduring quality of its architecture support the potential for a renewal that will enable older neighborhoods to better serve their existing populations and to attract new residents that share community goals. 

These urban assets provide strong reasons to ensure, not only careful rehabilitation, but also thoughtful infill projects.  Increased critical awareness among property owners, planners, and developers of existing patterns could help recover the clarity and meaning that give form and purpose to both the neighborhood and the city.

Appendix: Building Types

Mixed Use Buildings

For more than a century, the basic tissue of the city of Petersburg was the commercial building. At first these buildings, located along the streets near the river, were detached frame buildings of one or two stories, sometimes raised on a masonry basement. After the great fire of 1815, much of the city was rebuilt in continuous rows of brick buildings. These new buildings were at the same time the stores, workshops, or warehouses and the homes of the merchants and craftsman who operated them. Domestic life in Petersburg was largely lived at the second floor level, where noise and dust were reduced and a lively view of the street was possible from windows and balconies. 

Store/dwelling (mixed use building) at Dunlop and Commerce in the Battersea Neighborhood

Until very recent years, all stores and service shops were built directly against the sidewalk, on deep, narrow lots to maximize the exposure of the occupant’s wares to passersby while making the most economic use of extremely valuable urban land. Even when built alone on a block, commercial buildings were planned so that later buildings could be built to abut them on either side without loss of any structural or environmental advantage. 

Even when a block began by accommodating residential tissue, like Washington Street west of Brickhouse Run, the inherent rules of planning permitted its full or partial transformation into commercial fabric as the city grew to the south and west. Everyday access to downtown stores was not sufficiently convenient as the neighborhood began to grow after the Civil War. Owner-occupied businesses like the one seen here would first make an appearance on the corners most likely to attract customers. As the twentieth century progressed, the commercial tissue, by this time only one-story in height, expanded toward the center of the block. Had Petersburg continued to grow in that direction, commercial buildings would have eventually filled that entire block. Meanwhile, isolated stores, such as the one seen at the corner of Commerce and West, would continue to make an appearance on busy corners where there was a need or opportunity.

William S. Simpson Jr. watercolor of a mixed use building

The building pictured above, formerly located at the NW corner of Washington and West Streets, housed the drug store of William H. Lane in the late nineteenth century when it was sketched. It shows how the store, with its corner entry, incorporated the pharmacist’s residence over the shop and at the rear. The mortar and pestle sign, the tree with its protective lattice enclosure, and the telephone pole all document the appearance of the neighborhood in the late nineteenth century.

Dwellings

Small double houses were built as tenements for the housing of workers in Petersburg’s early industries. As tobacco factories, iron foundries, and water-powered flour and cotton mills were built in the 1830s, the need for skilled workers increased. The tradition of the double house appears to have begun as housing for workers in the various industries and are clustered near the great antebellum industrial centers- along the tailrace of the canal basin and along the river above and at the falls. One 1/2-story, double, single-cell dwellings were built on tiny lots subdivided from the original half-acre lots in Pride’s Field. Matching ells and dependencies extend to the rear of each half house.  The houses use the traditional Virginia convention of the half-story garret with dormers serving as an upper-floor chamber.    

Synoptic Table of house forms in the neighborhood (Andrew Marshall and Gibson Worsham for StudioAmmons)

As the nineteenth century passed, the double house appeared at a wide range of scales, serving the housing requirements of most economic levels. They ranged from the smallest, the one-room house, augmented by the possibility of doubling in depth and height and measuring as little as twenty-four feet across the front, to three-bay, side-passage-plan dwellings finished with a high level of detail and expense and measuring as much as forty feet across the principal facade. During its last and most mature phase, the double house dominated building in the North Battersea-Pride’s Field section. 

Two-story, double side-passage-plan house

From about 1870 to 1910, scores of two-story, frame double side-passage-plan houses were built by developers, usually in groups of two. These buildings, which are alomost always two rooms deep, were built at a range of scales. The largest double houses had six-bay facades and were given decorative cornices, doorways, and porches. Rooms were about 20 feet square, while medium sized houses, with rooms about 16-18 feet square, were given simpler detailing. The smallest side-passage-plan houses were plainly detailed and had four-bay facades and rooms of 15 feet square or less. Double side-passage-plan houses from this period were less frequently built on one-story version. As in the antebellum period, the smallest two-story houses did not have room for a passage but were of a single room in width. 

One story side-passage plan house from the early twentieth century. 

In addition to the house in its single and double form, other house forms appeared in Battersea from an early date. Landowners built detached dwellings that were part of the same architectural tradition as those in the surrounding rural areas. House forms known as the one-room house, the hall-chamber or two-room house, and the center-passage-plan house were built in one- and two-story examples and in depths of one and two rooms. Variations of the same types were built as late as 1920. Many dwellings today still mimic these regional vernacular forms in plan and elevation.  

Above. the fully expressed Corinthian order is used in a temple front form at the 
Memorial Methodist Church on Washington Street. The church, like many 
others in Petersburg, occupies a conventional lot in an otherwise residential area.  

Churches in the Battersea neighborhood

       

Special Buildings

Special buildings are those structures that serve the community as a whole or larger elements within it or that are designed to appear as if they did. Buildings such as courthouses, schools, and theaters are made with permanent materials, expensive finishes, and highly developed forms. The Battersea neighborhood, remote from the city center, was provided with few civic or public buildings. Most major denominations made it their business to establish congregations in the new neighborhood. These soon built churches, often beginning with small frame structures on secondary streets. Later, two larger brick Gothic churches with brick towers and a Classical Revival temple form church, both on Washington Street, were constructed as earlier congregations grew. The Seaboard Air Line Railroad Station facing Upper Appomattox Street is a very specialized public building type. Although poorly maintained today, it is architecturally distinguished and might someday be an important part of the neighborhood’s public life.

Historic Battersea, 1768 (Palladian Society)

Merchants, mill-owners, and professionals built houses on large, elevated tracts away from the noise and smell of industry and outside of the platted sections of the town. These houses, which were usually not directly associated with agricultural production, were being built by the mid-eighteenth century on the hills overlooking the town and the river. John Bannister’s nearby Palladian villa at Battersea, and other houses like the early nineteenth-century villa called Montview in the Fort Henry subdivision, and Peter Jones’ large frame house named Folly Castle, with their associated gardens, dotted the outskirts of the city. Their sophisticated forms and rich materials presented models for architectural self-expression for use in the detailing of commercial and residential buildings that took part of the regular urban tissue.

Seidenburg & Co. Cigar Factory, 1906 . Industrial building with 
tower at entrance, now multifamily residential

Industrial Buildings 

Mills, factories, and other industrial buildings were built on a wide variety of sites through the city, including in and around the Battersea neighborhood. At first most mills, which usually depended on water power for their operation, looked similar, as the small scale of local industry did not require buildings much larger than a house. As mills grew larger and tobacco factories and later industrial buildings were constructed away from access to water, they still required a regular grid of timber structure on the interior for maximum flexibility of function, massive masonry wall on the exterior for stability, and regularly spaced windows for light and ventilation. The need to keep all the workers near light sources encouraged the buildings to take a rectangular form and to be no wider in the shorter sides than three structural bays. Often a tower was constructed at one end to give easy access to the various floors and to house a bell that sounded the start and stop of work. As the types of industry grew more diverse and complex, buildings were extended and the towers were augmented by tall water tanks. 

Historic View of Titmus Optical Industrial Complex along Commerce Street

The replacement of the canal by the railroad in 1902 encouraged the development of industry on the adjacent, formerly residential lots along its southern side. Industrial employment encouraged the further infilling of any lots that remained vacant nearby with worker housing. Industry eventually expanded to fill a band that extended through the entire district. Today the industrial section forms a visual wall between the northern and southern halves of the district.  

The foregoing account is derived in part from the Battersea Design Guidelines prepared at StudioAmmons in Petersburg, Virginia in 2013.  The study was funded by a grant from the Virginia Housing and Development Authority and was executed by Gibson Worsham and Andrew Marshall under the supervision of Terry Ammons.

Entrepot, Town, Borough, and City: An Urban History of Petersburg, Part Three

At the start of the eighteenth-century spate of privately sponsored town-making, the land at the fall line belonged to two families. While much of the land on the south side of the river had been granted to Abraham Wood (c1614-1682) in 1646, the land was subject to a dramatic and formative split at Wood’s death in 1682.  He divided his land equally between four grandsons, the children of his daughter Margaret and Indian trader Peter Jones I. Abraham, Richard, Peter, and William Jones. Richard Jones and Peter Jones II received their parcels on either side of the Falls or Carolina Path or Halifax Road (now Sycamore and Halifax streets). Richard’s tract included Appomattox Point and his brother’s included the upper landing. This division of the future site of the city to each side of this curving route is the source of much of the irregularity of the city’s layout.  Peter Jones’ descendants continued to own the land west of the road for many years.  Another portion of the Wood tract to the west was inherited by John Bannister III from his mother Martha Batte (Jones) Bannister.  Peter Jones II probably continued to operate as an Indian trader.

Detail of Conjectural Map of Petersburg between 1700 and 1760 by
StudioAmmons, drawn by Dolly Holmes and Gibson Worsham. 

By 1705-6, the land between Lieutenant’s Run and Sycamore Street had been acquired from Richard Jones by a very successful Indian trader named Robert Bolling II, whose family had been prominent in the area since 1670.  This tract, which he named Bollingbrook, featured two broad terraces above the river backed by a marshy area. It was overlooked from the south by rising ground incorporating three low hills, known as East, West, and Centre hills. Robert Bolling built his house, called Bollingbrook, on East Hill, probably, based on its appearance, in the 1760s. Appomattox Point (or the “Point of Petersburg” as William Byrd called it in 1733) was eventually renamed Bolling Point.  

The prominence of Appomattox Point as a regional trading center is underlined by its selection as the site of a chapel for the region around 1720. The established church was represented by Bristol Parish. This religious jurisdiction, like most parishes in the colony, provided its far-flung communities with chapels of ease near transportation nodes or major settlements.  The chapel was built near the river crossing below the falls and was known as the Ferry Chapel. When a new parish brick church for the locality was built in the mid-1730s, it was placed on Well’s Hill east of the Bolling lands and immediately north of the planned site of the town of Blandford, where it could serve not only town dwellers, but the surrounding country population.  In this rural placement, it is similar to Richmond’s plainer frame church of 1742, which occupied a remote site on the bluff above the town. The more expensive material of the church on Wells Hill indicates that the Petersburg area was possessed of greater wealth than Richmond.

The land beyond the falls was settled in the first years of the eighteenth century by tobacco planters who sent their tobacco in rolling hogsheads to merchants at the falls where they could be transferred on board sea-going craft waiting in the James, where Bermuda Hundred was the principal tobacco port. Planters also undoubtedly sent hogsheads down the Appomattox as far as the falls in simple canoes or other boats. William Byrd, a successful trader on skins and tobacco, maintained a store on a tract of land on the Appomattox well below the falls. In the spring of 1712 Byrd wrote in his diary, “the sloop came from Appomattox with 60 hogsheads of tobacco.. . . The sloop came about 10 o’clock and brought 13 hogshead of skins from Appomattox where all was well, thank God Almighty. . . . The sloop carried the skins and nine hogsheads of tobacco on board the ship.” 

Legislation regulating tobacco exports and quality and designed to protect the value of Virginia tobacco came into effect in 1730. Warehouses were mandated at collection points along Virginia’s rivers, including a warehouse, possibly already in use, near the landing at Bolling’s Point owned by Robert Bolling II and one authorized for John Bolling across the river.  The number of warehouses increased over time as Petersburg became a very important tobacco port. Eventually Robert Bolling owned two warehouses in Blandford and three warehouses on the flat Bolling land between Lieutenant’s and Brickhouse runs: the Bolling Warehouse to the west, the Cedar Point Warehouse in the middle, and the Bollingbrook Warehouse to the east. Like William Byrd’s Richmond, Petersburg needed additional lots on which to settle merchants and factors involved in the tobacco trade.

Roads south and west of Petersburg have changed a great deal since the eighteenth century. As we have seen, the significance of Petersburg as a military seat and a market in both prehistoric and historic periods related to the termination there of two important paths providing, due to geographical alignments, direct access to much of the trade in the upper South. The falls became a major trading site because it served as a collection point for produce from the backcountry and a distribution center for goods and supplies. 

PETERSBURG, 1700-1760. Conjectural Map by StudioAmmons, drawn 
by Dolly Holmes and Gibson Worsham

The network of paths and roads that led to and from Petersburg would contribute greatly to the form the town would take. 

By the early eighteenth century the paths had been adapted and new roads built to accommodate the rolling of hogsheads of tobacco into the town (dates in parentheses indicate the earliest references):

• The combined section of the Occaneechi/Sapponi path left the western end of Old Street (Grove Avenue) in Petersburg. It corresponded to the route of a road later ordered in 1730 to the mill operated by Abraham Cocke, who settled at the forks of the Little and Big Nottaway Rivers (US 460 west near Blackstone) [W. R. Turner, Old Homes and Families in Nottoway]. The road, (called in 1755 "the road that leads to our settlements on Wood's [New] River) is still known as Cox Road as it leaves Petersburg.  
• The Road to Carolina (1755) Road to Hick's Ford (1783) or Halifax Road, as it left Petersburg, corresponded to Sycamore and Halifax streets.   High Street intersected with an alternate connection to the Halifax Road for those living west of Brickhouse Run- Jones Street- called the “Back Road to Petersburg” on the 1790  plat of Gillfield. 
• The Road to Jerusalem (1783) was an old road that led to the southeast. It formed the central armature of the town of Blandford in 1738 and it gave access to the Church on Wells Hill (Blandford Church). 
• The road to the east, at first known as the King’s Road,  survives as Route 36. 
• The Richmond Road, part of the old Falls Path, came from the north and crossed the Appomattox at Pocahontas. 

Version of 1738 Plat of Petersburg from Pollard, showing sturgeon dam
and cross street giving access to water.

The first of the five towns at the fall of the Appomattox to be formally platted were the towns of Petersburg and Blandford. Petersburg is a double row of lots lining the old route of the Trading Path to the Occaneechi and Sappony villages to the south and west, now known as Cocke’s Road. These lots, that extended above and below the actual falls, were laid out by 1738 for Peter Jones on the narrow terrace of land west of the trading settlement at Bolling’s Point.  The long one-acre lots, measuring 100  by 400 feet, were placed in a long row, it extent broken by a single cross street just below a “sturgeon dam” or fish weir, possibly dating to pre-historic times, stretching across the river. Since the dam blocked passage to river traffic, it seems likely that the 30-foot-wide cross street (Shanks Lane in 1879) gave access to a river landing immediately below the falls  that served the town. The lots were also broken by the crossing of a marshy creek. 

Typical double log canoe used for transporting tobacco on Virginia rivers.

The river was an important transportation route at the beginning of the century. Double dugout log canoes were used to transport tobacco on many Virginia rivers until the third quarter of the eighteen century. They would likely have found it easier to stop in the part of Petersburg that extended above the falls. The Appomattox River was improved after 1745, when the colonial government began approving acts to improve navigation by removing obstructions, including mill dams, fish hedges, and trees. The falls themselves seem unlikely to have been crossed by canoes. A pre-existing mill dam and race is shown across the river at the falls in 1738 as well as the salmon dam and these do not appear to have been breeched. The old town section seems to have remained important as a wharf for the receipt of produce arriving from upstream. These goods would have been transported by wagon to the lower part of town for transshipment. The completion of the Upper Appomattox Canal in 1816 simply removed the transfer point for goods and tobacco from the river to the canal basin at the top of the hill.

The east-west alignment of buildings was ordained by the topography and by the likely route of the Sapponi Trail along the waterfront. The new town was separated from the existing trading and warehouse community by the water of Brickhouse Run and limited in width by the river to the north and a swampy slough to the rear between the lots and a low bluff.  By contrast, the new town of Richmond, platted for Byrd next to the unincorporated tobacco town of Shockoes, was a wide grid of uninflected “squares” or blocks of each containing four half-acre lots. 

Old Town, as it was known, would not have fallen out of favor after the new bridge of 1752 at Pocahontas cut off access by most boats from below (it was to have been arched to height of ten feet to permit the passage of flatboats and other vessels). Canoes from upstream would still have needed to offload tobacco above the falls to cart their cargo to warehouses at Blandford, Pocahontas, and the unofficial settlement on Robert Bolling’s land. 

Petersburg is like other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia cities in the way it developed. Most cites, including Williamsburg (Middle Plantation, 1632; city, 1722) , Richmond (village of Shockoes early 18th c; town, 1742; city, 1782), Fredericksburg (Smith’s Fort, 1681, town, 1721), and Alexandria  began as informal military or mercantile settlements, long before land in their vicinity was platted or incorporated. The falls of the Appomattox appear to have served as an Indian trading node well before Fort Henry was established by the House of Burgesses in 1646. Settlement occurred around the fall line between two points. The upper landing, also known as the Oystershell Landing, was the highest navigable point on the river, while Appomattox Point, at a narrow river bend slightly lower, was a good place for a ferry or bridge.  

Petersburg is unlike most other Virginia towns in its complex geographic layout. While other Virginia towns were laid out and expanded over time in a uniform grid that was usually spread uniformly over hills and ravines, Petersburg was developed by a series of landed proprietors. Likely sections of land were laid out in disconnected blocks over a period of two centuries. They were separated from each other developments by low-lying sloughs, creeks, hills, and the Appomattox River. Some of these developments were seen as extensions of earlier plats, but most received separate incorporation as towns. As a result, by 1784, the area contained five separate "towns" or land developments separated by narrow tracts, watercourses, or county lines.  

Map of Petersburg c 1783 by StudioAmmons, drawn by Dolly 
Holmes and Gibson Worsham

Bollingbrook platted 1783

The Revolution brought with it new growth in the area of Petersburg, encouraging the property owners to provide annexes that would join the disparate parts of the community into a whole.  The first of the post-war land developments was sponsored by Robert Bolling III, who laid out the flat land between Petersburg and Blandford as the new community of Bollingbrook.  Bolling and his father had not been inclined to lay out his prime land as a town previously, even though towns had been developed fifty years previously to either side at Petersburg and Blandford. The reason appears to be that Bolling thought the property more profitable under his own proprietorship than as a town of freeholders. 

Bollingbrook, mid-eighteenth-century Bolling House on East Hill.

The surveyor of Bolling’s 40-acre Bollingbook tract, Dinwiddie County Surveyor William Watkins, did not follow common Virginia practice as used at Richmond.  Probably because there were so many existing features like warehouses on Bolling’s land, he didn’t use the length of a surveyor’s chain to conveniently create uniform blocks or squares of four half-acre lots. As in the previous adjoining towns, blocks of irregular length were subdivided divided into large, regular lots arranged along generous streets paralleling the river. Most lots were 100 feet wide and 217 feet deep, giving them the standard 1/2 acre size, except the lots closest to the river, which were 400 feet in depth.  At thirty feet wide, Back Street appears to have been intended to serve as an alley, although the rear of the town was for many years marshy and undeveloped. Bollingbrook Street, at 58 feet feet in width, was only slightly less important than Water Street, then clearly the main street. 

Plat of Robert Bolling's Addition to the Town of Petersburg,
1809.  It shows the courthouse, jail, and the adjacent Episcopal
Church on West Hill next to the Bolling House called East Hill. It also
shows the Bolling Warehouse Square that became the Market
Square and "the Mansion House of Mrs. Bolling," known as
 Bollingbook.

The annex to the south platted for the Bollings in 1809 followed the same pattern, only with alleys between each row of lots. Lots were 210 feet deep and, in order to get five lots in each block, the 130 foot width of the lots at the east were compressed to as little as 100 feet at the west.  

Robert Bolling IV House on West Hill

The Bollings probably had for years leased some land along the waterfront adjacent to their three warehouses, but found the tobacco trade more profitable than any other use of the otherwise marshy land.  In the late eighteenth century, he laid out the tract in lots, but kept control of the freehold and charged ground rent, an ancient British system,  also employed in cities such Alexandria, Baltimore, and Norfolk, under which the lots are leased to tenants who then are authorized to build on them and are required to pay a ground rent to the landowner. 

This practice did not prevent the district from becoming the commercial center of the new Borough of Petersburg, which united the several towns a year after the platting of Bollingbook. However, the system sometimes led to controversy and, in 1815, Bolling was embroiled in a lawsuit. Bolling had leased a lot on Old Street to a tenant named Stokes in 1815 for a term of five years at a rate of fifty dollars per year in ground rent.  After the borough elected to pave the street in 1817 and billed him $847 as his share of the cost, Stokes tried unsuccessfully to retrieve the sum from Bolling at the expiration of the lease. The courts were asked to ascertain who should pay the cost. Stokes won the case both locally and on appeal [Virginia reports: Jefferson--33 Grattan, 1730-1880 By Thomas Johnson Michie, Thomas Jefferson, Peachy Ridgway Grattan].

Robert Bolling’s original warehouse burned in 1755 and again in 1783, after which it was relocated to higher ground on West Hill along the Halifax Road (now Sycamore Street).  Several sites were not included in the platted land and affected the placement of streets and lots.  The site of the original warehouse formed an open square near the river crossing. As seen in the 1809 plat above, the two other Bolling warehouses were labelled Cedar Point Square and Bollingbrook Square. A section of land just east of the bridge represents the historic dock area. A note says that it “contains several Lumber Houses and cannot be laid off at present.  The area between Bollingbrook and Petersburg, the marshy bed of Brickhouse Run, was left undeveloped, although Old Street traversed the run by a bridge as early as 1781, as seen on the map below.  Bank Street was added to join High Street to Sycamore in 1808 and rapidly became the most desirable commercial street. Land was so valuable that Brickhouse Run was submerged under Market, Bank, and Old streets by means of arched stone culverts.
  

Petersburg at the time of the skirmish with the British in 

1781. The map, although out of scale and distorted from 

actual conditions, shows plainly the layout at the time of 

the Revolution. Old Town and New Town Petersburg held 

many buildings, and many buildings are shown in the 

Bolling property included as part of Blandford on the map.

The street layout, prior to Bolling's platting of this area is 

informal in appearance. Bridges are shown linking 

Petersburg, Bollingbook, and Blandford.

The Borough of Petersburg incorporated in 1784

The collection of disparate towns were in the following year incorporated into one political unit, the Borough of Petersburg, that transcended the legal authority of the three counties in which each remained. The towns had requested in 1779 that the government incorporate Petersburg, Blandford, and Pocahontas and the lands of Robert Bolling, the land of John Tabb, a tract belonging to the heirs of Peter Jones, and a section referred to as the suburbs, into one political unit called the Borough of Petersburg. The new borough had a mayor, aldermen, and a common council. While it was good for the community as whole to be unified, consolidation meant that some of the constituent units would fade from prominence.   

A new borough required public institutions and, eventually public buildings. A market, the most basic institution of a city, was ordained in 1785. At first, like at Richmond, it was conducted on the common land along the river. This may have been at the mouth of Brickhouse Run near the street known as Short Market Street. A building was built to house the market in 1787 on the very appropriate site of Bolling’s Warehouse, offered by Bolling to house the public buildings of the city after the burning of the warehouse. The market square was a spot where the oldest roads gathered and formed a square surrounding the warehouse site. Very little is known of the market buildings in Petersburg, but market buildings were erected on the site of the present market in 1787, 1805, and 1815. Before 1787 a market structure stood near the Cedar Point Warehouse and a space of river bank was marked where produce could be sold from boats and canoes.  The common hall and court of the borough met in the Golden Ball Tavern for the first years.   

Petersburg’s location was often said to be unhealthy, due to marshy areas between the river and the bluff to the south in both the old section of Petersburg and in Bollingbrook. “The situation of the town is low and rather unhealthy” said Jedidiah Morse in his American Gazetteer of 1797.  Robert Bolling was even said to have been the only person born in eighteenth-century Petersburg to have survived to adulthood, a statistic that indicates how many people in the town in that year were immigrants. The town ameliorated that condition by filling in the marsh. The urban fabric was knit together in 1800, when Bank Street was constructed over Brickhouse Run to connect High and Back streets.  The town paved Bollingbrook Street in 1813.  

Detail from the original 1809 plat of the Bolling Sections of the
City of Petersburg showing the public square with the
courthouse and church next Robert Bolling IV's house on
West Hill.

Struggle for the Center  

The next decades saw a struggle for primacy among the three principal neuclei of the city. Pocahontas faded quickly. Blandford laid out in the 1790s a public square for a courthouse at a principal intersection. Members of the Bolling and Jones families vied for the location of public buildings in their sectors. Peter Jones of Folly Castle’s niece, Sarah Newsome, gave land to the new borough for public buildings west of and north of the corner of Tabb and Union streets in 1789. Her husband Erasmus Glll took back the land and Robert Bolling offered the Bolling Warehouse site for that purpose. Neither were ever developed. The court and council meetings were held at the Golden Ball Tavern. 

In 1791, Robert Bolling IV gave a part of West Hill in front of the present courthouse for a courthouse square. He also sold a lot on side of the courthouse for the site of a new church to replace the outmoded one at Blandford. The courthouse, of which no picture remains, was built right away, but the church was not completed until 1803. They both stood above the little town like a kind of acropolis.  Robert Bolling IV also built a house nearby on West Hill where he lived before he constructed his massive dwelling on Centre Hill in 1823.

Continue to Part Four