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

Working from Home: An Urban History of Petersburg: Part Four

View along Grove Ave.

...The division of dwelling place and working place was no recognized feature of the social structure of the towns which our ancestors inhabited. The journey to work, the lonely lodger paying his rent out of a factory wage or an office salary, are the distinguishing marks of our society, not of theirs. We are forced to suppose that in industrial and commercial matters the working family was assumed to be self-sufficient on its labour, in spite of the vicissitudes of the market.  

                                            Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost

Towns in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Virginia were oriented around commerce. Towns were provided to concentrate the availability of products and services needed for the organization of commercial and agricultural activities. The distribution of land in Petersburg began before the 1730s, by which time the surveying of land and the regional manner of laying out of towns was well developed.  The lots in 1730s Petersburg and Blandford were established for the building of merchant and artisan enterprises. Eventually, there were as many as sixty merchants in Petersburg.

In most cases merchants and artisans lived in the structures occupied by their shops and stores, although by the mid-eighteenth century the most financially independent citizens began to build suburban dwellings on hills above the town, where the marshy air and bustling activity could be avoided. In many cases, business owners housed and fed their clerks or apprentices with their families. For the first 75 years, the town was made up of one- and two-story frame structures like those built throughout the Tidewater region during this period. The half-acre lots appear to have been considered large enough for a main building and the domestic offices and garden needed to support an urban family without rural property. Most buildings were placed near the front edge of the property with the implicit understanding that eventual subdivision of the lots would create a virtual wall of buildings. Its helpful to think of the similar but much more populous Duke of Gloucester Street in Colonial Williamsburg in this regard. 

A version of the 1738 Plat of Petersburg from the Clerk's Office (above)
matched with the same area shown on the Beers Map of 1879

The 1738 plat of Petersburg contains much useful information.  The two stylized buildings shown on the plat on the east (north is to the bottom) were probably occupied by members of the Jones family, since they stand on undistributed land. They stand on prime sites flanking the main route- Water Street (todays Grove Avenue)- and line the west side of the “road,” the route of the trading path corresponding to High Street. The road continues as Short Market Street to the upper landing and forks to the east to the lower landing on the other side of Brickhouse Run. An upper landing for boats is shown between lots 6 and 7. 

1815 Plat of Petersburg showing street layout. Petersburg General District Court Clerk's Office. The creek to the left is Brickhouse Run and the creek to the right is Lieutenant's Run.

During the eighteenth century most buildings were ranged on either side of the road that paralleled the waterfront, known as Poythress Street in Blandford, River Street in the Bollingbrook area, and Water Street in Old Petersburg. As Cocke’s Road, it led west to Blackstone and east toward the James as the King’s Road. The road crossed Lieutenant’s Run on a causeway and bridge that were renewed in 1796. The draw of the river made this road the principal location for buildings rather than the important Halifax Road that intersected it at the center. 

The basic building of the Virginia town until the antebellum period was the store/dwelling. The value of land for commercial use led to the lining of the principal routes with long rows of these store/dwellings. The gradual infilling of the town’s grid took many years, as civic institutions, service functions, and professions multiplied. As space became more valuable, secondary 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 rules established by the town government to ensure regularity and safety. 

Nicholson Store, Williamsburg (restored 1949-50) [CWF].

Examples of urban stores in Virginia from the mid-eighteenth century include the store that forms the core of the Market Square Tavern in Williamsburg, the Nicholson Store, also in Williamsburg, and the Lewis Store of 1749 in Fredericksburg. Unilke the very substantial brick Lewis Store, most commercial buildings in Virginia tended to be built of framed wood. They were often placed with their shortest wall to the street (often the gable end) and contained an unheated sales room in front and a heated counting room or office to the rear. The owner/shopkeeper and his apprentice employees lived upstairs in a half-story garret, a full second floor, or in a domestic wing.     

Buildings in the older parts of Petersburg that had escaped the fire of 1815 were described several years later as “wooden houses, surrounded by balconies and supported by posts. The shops are like wooden booths.” 

Long before the platting of Bolingbrook in 1783, the nearby area on either side of the mouth of Brickhouse Run had been a commercial center. The Golden Ball Tavern, located near the creek at the corner of Water and Short Market Streets, was the city’s principal tavern after 1775.  Short Market Street linked with High Street, carrier of important traffic from the west and south after 1762. The placing of the new public market along the river here in the 1780s also shows the area’s centrality. After 1783, Blandford faded to obscurity and Old Petersburg survived as a secondary residential and industrial area. 

The Richard Hanson Building, at the corner of Water (Old) and Short Market streets, was built, probably in the 1760s, as the home and place of business of one of the town's most prominent tobacco merchants. It was later adapted for use as the famous Golden Ball Tavern, but well represents early Petersburg's merchant elite. Like other eighteenth-century merchant structures, it stood, until it was demolished in 1944, on a raised masonry basement. 

Few eighteenth-century basic buildings remains in the Bollingbrook area or Blandford, although photographs of the store/dwelling of tobacco merchant Richard Hanson (later the Golden Ball Tavern) give a good idea of how such buildings would have appeared.  The choice of it or of another tavern to serve as the meeting place for borough council and court between 1784 and 1793 give an idea of the scale and form of buildings in the late eighteenth century. Similarly, the gable-fronted, two-story, frame John Baird Building of 1783-84 in Old Petersburg may well have housed a business enterprise, not only in the raised stone basement, but in the large front room on the main floor.  

John Baird Building, 420 Grove Ave. (above)

Baird-Rambault-Daufossy Building, 426 Grove Ave. (below)

Another frame building with a stone basement associated with developer John Baird, is the Baird-Rambault-Daufossy Building. Located at 426 Grove Avenue, it is among Petersburg’s best preserved eighteenth-century store buildings. With its raised stone basement (and before a substantial late nineteenth-century alteration that greatly changed its appearance) it probably resembled a smaller version of the gable-fronted nearby John Baird Building on lot 31. It was undoubtedly also similar to the Nicholson Store seen above. The building was one and three-quarter stories in height (later raised to two stories). A three-bay facade, probably gable-fronted, with a central door flanked by windows, gave access to an unheated front room. Behind it was placed an office or “counting room” flanked by a passage containing a stair. An off-center exterior chimney provided heat to the counting room and the room above. 

Of course, as the scale and complexity of the city grew, expansion of opportunities led to the need for separate housing for those employed in stores or shops, including both owners and workers, and so independent urban dwellings were present from the start on the edges and back streets of the city. These shared in the language and forms used by regional architectural traditions, constrained by the availability and shape of building lots. In the same way, as time passed, living above the shop lost its logic, and many shop-owners moved off their premises during the antebellum period into new street-level residential accommodations. 

More to Follow.

"A Nest of Tobacco Towns:" An Urban History of Petersburg, Part Two

Sequence of Growth

1630-1700

The intersection of a network of ancient Indian paths with the navigable water below the falls of the Appomattox River resulted in the growth of an important control depot for Indian-settler relations, which grew after 1670 into a major economic driver for the region. Abraham Wood’s Fort Henry land was the site of a small trading settlement.  

1700-1760

 After Abraham Wood’s death in 1682, his land was subdivided in ways that would affect the growth of the town. The small settlement on the low ground at Appomattox Point, still the focus of trade routes extending far into the back country, was expanded at mid-century by landowners intending to capitalize on the successful trade in backcountry tobacco based just below the falls.  A new church on a hill overlooking near Blandford indicated that the falls area was becoming a center as well for a growing rural population.

1760-1780

As the country population increased, the commercial, industrial, and craft center had expanded into the higher, healthier land south of the river by the second half of the eighteenth century. Robert Bolling II likely began building on his land in the center well before he had it officially recorded in 1783.  Pre-existing roads, swampy land, pronounced hills, and old property boundaries determined the complex shape and form of the new town.

1780-1800

The residents requested incorporation as a borough in 1779 and received it in 1784. The existing towns were incorporated into the new city. New “towns,” some of which existed only on paper, were laid out over the next several decades within its boundaries, including Ravenscroft (1786) and Gillfield (1790) on the land of Abraham Jones’ grandaughter, Sarah Newsum. Public squares were created to house the essential buildings associated with community life:  a market, court house, and jail. Center Hill and Poplar Spring were used for assembly and recreation purposes. Undeveloped lots in older sections were infilled with new buildings.

1800 and after

The urban fabric remained porous and small in scale until a great fire in 1815 and an overheated economy prompted a rapid rebuilding and expansion. Continuous lines of brick buildings now lined the main streets downtown and new streets, such as Bank, South Market, and Washington, and connected the formerly diffuse neighborhoods. As transportation systems matured and buisness boomed, Sycamore joined Bollingbrook Street to form one long route lined with basic commerical/residential buildings.

[Maps from the Battersea Design Guidelines. Drawn by Dolly Holmes and Gibson Worsham]

Narrative

As we have seen, most of the land at the falls of the Appomattox was originally controlled by one man, Abraham Wood, who dominated local political and commercial life. He appears to have divided his land among four grandchildren, thereby creating a complex and counter-intuitive series of urban forms that developed over many years. The city extended piece-meal over its hilly and swampy terrain and the street pattern avoided low-lying ground and incorporated irregularities resulting from a variety of owners and developers. That legacy, and the decisions made by the powerful Bolling family after 1706, determined the shape of the city to this day.   

William Byrd II

It is useful to compare Richmond and Petersburg. At the similar site at the falls of the James River, William Byrd II, after years of industrial and agricultural development around the falls, founded two formal towns there in order to forestall anyone else doing so. Byrd appears to have preferred leasing tracts to merchants rather than selling outright. Such leaseholds, in the form of ground rent, were a popular practice among landowners. also used by landowners in Petersburg and Norfolk.   Byrd had complained in 1727 that he would have to lose money by turning over 50 acres of his land at the tobacco inspection point to create a town, in response to a bill for that purpose presented to the House of Burgesses. While he realized that he could profit from the sales, he was afraid that someone was pressing for the bill in order to set up a rival tobacco warehouse.  He soon after had lots laid out for sale at the towns of Richmond and  Manchester.

The planning of Petersburg is also often attributed to William Byrd II (1674-1744) and his surveyor friend William Mayo (1684-1744). Although Byrd owned an important store downriver from the falls and owned lots in the town of Petersburg, he had no other direct interest in the improvement of the land around Appomattox Point. The actuality of Byrd’s “founding” is less literal and more humorous. In 1733, William Byrd II and William Mayo, surveyor, left the Falls of the Appomattox, joined by John Banister, Robert Mumford, and Peter Jones IV to travel along the Trading Path on what Byrd named the "Journey to the Land of Eden" to survey land they had previously claimed on the Roanoke River. Byrd’s tract was named Blue Stone Castle after a blue stone found there in a creek bed “sufficient,” he said, “in quantity to build a large castle.” 

After he returned from a canoe tour of inspection to the modest overseer’s house at Blue Stone Castle, Byrd and “the company” discussed the potential value of laying out cities at the falls of Appomattox, on land owned by the Jones, and on the James, on land owned by Byrd. Byrd related that they metaphorically “laid the foundation of two large cities. One was at Shacco's, to be called Richmond, and the other was at the point of Appomattox river, to be named Petersburg. These Major Mayo offered to lay out into lots without fee or reward. The truth of it is, these two places being the uppermost landing of James and Appomattox rivers, are naturally intended for marts, where the traffic of the outer inhabitants must centre. Thus we did not build castles only [referring to his tract of land at Blue Stone Castle], but also cities in the air.” 

Within four years Richmond was actually laid out by Mayo on land just below the falls of the James. One year later, the smaller town called Petersburg was also platted, and although the exact circumstances are not clear, it does appear that Peter Jones IV returned from the trip determined to enlarge the settlement at the falls with a grid of lots. It is hard not to believe that the town is named for Peter Jones IV, given his ownership of the land. It is equally likely that the satirical William Byrd, in reference to the immense efforts of his near contemporary Peter the Great of Russia to built a great city in a much more swampy location, christened the new town as a jest based on his friend’s name.  All four of the companions on the Journey to Eden, with the exception of Mayo, purchased one or more lots in the town of Petersburg.    

Sketch of the Skirmish at Petersburg between the Royal Army... and the American Army, April 25th, 1781 [London : William Faddon, 1784]. Blandford is inaccurately shown extending into the Bollingbrook section across Lieutenant's Run.

The initial settlements at Appomattox were placed on the first terrace above the river, where the creeks were more easily forded. Streets were aligned with the river and related to the tobacco warehouses, mills, and other activities that supported the local economy (as seen in the 1783 map). Landings above the point made it easy to pull boats onshore. Wharfs were added later and extended the usefulness of the banks well beyond the original landings. Log canoes and, after the 1770s, light-weight batteaux brought tobacco down the river, but these would have all landed safely above the falls. 

An urban setting was necessary to foster and control a commercial economy. The colonial government had encouraged the creation of cities and towns through the seventeenth century with only limited success. 

By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, three major landowners developed provisional towns at the falls. These included Petersburg (by 1738), Blandford (by 1738), and Wittontown, later Pocahontas (by 1749), all placed close to the river’s edge. It seems possible that the marshy central area near the landing, purchased by county surveyor and tobacco merchant Robert Bolling II and named Bolling Brook, was also informally platted in the mid-eighteenth century. Unfortunately, Bolling’s use of ground rent and leases for his lot-holders and the loss of Dinwiddie County records, make its evolution opaque, but the 1781 British military map does seem to show several rows of buildings already built along Bollingbrook and Back Street, two years before the layout was officially recorded.

Copy of the plat of the town of Petersburg, 1738 from City of Petersburg Clerk's Office. View from north.

Copy of the plat of the town of Blandford, 1738 from City of Petersburg Clerk's Office. View from north.

Copy of the plat of the town of Wittontown (Pocahontas), by 1749 from City of Petersburg Clerk's Office. View from south.

Blandford was laid out in 1738 for William Poythress (1695-1763), brother of the Indian trader Peter Poythress. William’s wife, Sarah Eppes (1702-1750), was the daughter of Col. Francis Eppes, merchant of Bermuda Hundred. Poythress, who was from the part of Prince George to the east of Petersburg, acquired large grants of land in what was later Dinwiddie County and moved there before his death.  

The trading node at the falls became a major center in the international tobacco trade when the colonial government established warehouses there for the collection and inspection of the cash crop beginning in 1730.  George Washington said that 1/3 of the tobacco in North America came through Petersburg. In 1762, a petition to expand the town indicated that it “had very greatly increased, and become a place of considerable trade.” 

Petersburg and Blandford, for which only copies of the original plats survive, were unofficially laid out in lots by their owners, as were a number of other early Virginia towns. They may have been professionally surveyed by Robert Bolling, although William Mayo, Goochland County surveyor, had offered to do so for free in 1733. While Petersburg was made up of generous one-acre lots lining the single main street, Blandford and Pocahontas were composed of the standard half-acre lots. 

Copy of the plat of Gillfield, before 1784, from the City of Petersburg Clerk's Office

Each town was laid out along a main road. The road that became Water Street in Petersburg was likely the route used to roll hogsheads of tobacco down from boats and farms above the falls.   Church Road in Blandford was not only the route to the church, but the road to South Key and other lands to the southeast (later developed as the Jerusalem Plank Road). Witttentown (Pocahontas) was laid out at the north end of the bridge over the river just off the main road to Richmond. It was the site, beginning in 1722 of the prosperous tobacco warehouse of John Bolling, great-grandson of Pocahontas, for whom the town was named years later. William Byrd II is thought to have said that Bolling enjoyed "all the profits of an immense trade with his countrymen, and of one still greater with the Indian."

As time passed, additional “towns,” including New Petersburg (1762) and New Blandford (1769) coalesced along these roads leading out of the falls area. Some of these, including Ravenscroft and Gillfield (both laid out before 1784), were clearly speculative and took an additional century to realize their promise. Gillfield eventually became the center of one of the South’s largest and most prosperous free Black community.

Copy of the plat of New Blandford, before 1784, from the City of Petersburg Clerk's Office

In 1783, however, a plat for the Bolling land (by now in the hands of Robert Bolling III) was recorded, filling in the missing center. Within a few years, the entire urban area was incorporated as the self-governing borough of Petersburg with Bollingbrook at its center. 

Continue to Part Three