A Place in the Country: An Urban History of Petersburg, Part Six

The country model, and that of a suburb villa, are different. The former partakes of the nature of a court, as a lord of the manor doth of regality, and should, like the court, have great rooms to contain numbers, with free suitable and other conveniences, according to his condition. A villa is quasi a lodge, for the sake of a garden, to retire to enjoy and sleep, without pretense of entertainment of many persons; and yet in this age, the humor takes after that, and not the other.

                                              Roger North, Of Building, 1698, quoted in Archer, Architecture and Suburbia, 2005.

American cities like Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, Petersburg, and Charleston were centers of merchant and mechanic activity. Thus, the principal private buildings in these cities were not solely residential or commercial, they were the combined house/stores of the merchants and artisans. Until well into the nineteenth century, many business owners, whatever their status, lived vertically, above their shops, in what we here are calling, for want of a better word, the “house/store.”  As cities grew, their density increased. The fully built-out city was a noisy and crowded place to live. Private houses tended to be built on less valuable tracts at the periphery of the commercial districts.

The house built on the New Town bluff along High
Street in the 1760s by Hallam Pride, now known as he Strachan-Harrison House.

Large landowners, rich shipping merchants, and professionals, such as lawyers and doctors, and mill-owners, with business in the city and no ties to the country, ignored the pull of the main street and built independent, architecturally distinguished houses on the edges of the city or on lots away from the smell and noise of the city center. These “town houses,” with associated open land laid out as a garden, took on the character of villas. Even these houses, set back on their large lots, embodied their owners’ intersection with city life by the provision of ground-floor offices or counting rooms.  Often, as in humid southern towns like Annapolis, Richmond, and Petersburg, the wealthiest members of the community took advantage of elevated views and riverside vistas to harness breezes and create a picturesque setting for their principal houses, Others built modest suburban dwellings as summer retreats and sites for cultivation of gardens, contemplation, and exclusive social relations.        

Suburban dwellings appeared at an early date in the higher ground southwest of the falls. New Town, a line of residential lots on each side of High Street, was platted in 1762 on the sloping bluff above the river.  A number of detached houses were built in this area from the mid-eighteenth century utilizing the full range of floor plans, building materials, and architectural details available to substantial Virginia planters.   

The classical content of most secondary education, the healthfulness of the countryside, the rhetoric of politics, the domestic requirements of slavery, and the republican ideals of many of the elites reinforced the desirability of a semi-retired life in an architecturally distinguished house on a tract just outside the town. Classical models were available to planters beginning in the middle of the century, building on Renaissance recreations of villas such as those described by the Roman writer Pliny.

Bollingbrook, home of Robert Bolling III

In Petersburg, landowning families like the Bollings, the Jones, and the Prides built substantial houses on the hills commanding views of the falls of the river, the countryside, and the little town. Like similar houses overlooking the James River in Richmond, these houses employed forms and details that were well established in the Virginia architectural grammar, rather than employing direct classical allusions to Pliny’s “Tuscan Villa.” An early example is Bollingbrook, a center-passage-plan house built in the mid-eighteenth century by Robert Bolling III on East Hill overlooking from on high what would become his tract along the river. 

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 on West Hill. It also
shows the Bolling Warehouse Square that became the Market
Square and "the Mansion House of Mrs. Bolling," on East Hill known as
 Bollingbook.

Over the years the Bollings built a series of houses on the three hills overlooking the river, one of which is seen next to the old courthouse on West Hill (to the left on the plat above) and the other Bollingbrook (on East Hill to the right), and finally the great mansion at Centre Hill which replaced them in 1823 by Robert Bolling IV. Centre Hill takes a very dominant position on axis with 3rd Street, as if it was a public building.  

Robert Bolling IV's house on West Hill

Centre Hill

Folly Castle

The Jones heirs divided the remaining land west of the Halifax Road. Brickhouse Run formed a natural dividing line between properties, running diagonally across later lots lines [NR form, Folly Castle Hist. Dist.]  In 1763, Peter Jones V built the house named Folly Castle, a grand frame central-passage-plan dwelling on a tract he inherited from his father, on the southeast side of the Run. The house has a modillion cornice, beaded siding, and interior end chimneys.

An elevated site was available on the bluff above Petersburg, where in 1762 Peter Jones added a new section of residential lots lining High Street above the marshy area along the riverbank.  Petersburg’s citizens gradually added a series of substantial houses on either side of High Street with lots extending down toward Brickhouse Run on the south. The earliest of these houses is the Hallam Pride House, built in the mid-eighteenth century see illustration above).  The substantial one and one-half-story dwelling is similar to a series of frame houses built across the region in the period. Its position on the edge of the bluff, out of alignment with High Street, suggests that Pride’s suburban aspirations preceded the other houses aligned with High Street. 

Battersea

In contrast to the more pedestrian Virginian houses overlooking the Appomattox, the splendid brick villa built by the first mayor of the borough of Petersburg was a remarkable departure from local forms. English-educated Col. John Bannister (1734-1778) built the house at his tract west of Petersburg in 1768 quoted directly from Renaissance recreations of the Italian villa as presented by British architect Robert Morris. Battersea is a grand five-part Palladian villa surrounded by gardens and a landscaped park. While Battersea enabled Bannister to supervise his extensive industrial and political interests nearby, he maintained a more remote plantation in Dinwiddie County for his advanced agricultural interests.  Battersea has been recognized as one of the earliest and finest surviving five-part plan houses in the colonies. 

Major suburban residences placed along High Street in later years included the two-story, brick John F. May House of c. 1810 at 244 High Street; the two-story brick center-passage-plan house at 265 High Street of c 1800; the two-story, frame center-passage-plan dwelling of c 1800 at 254 High Street; Dodson’s Tavern, a two-story frame building dating from about 1790; and the Hinton House, a two-story, brick building of c 1800, among others. 

Strawberry Hill

Other suburban houses were built on larger, independent tracts acquired from the Jones holding west of town. The Donnan House, a conventional, two-story, central-passage-plan dwelling, was built for Joel Hammond about 1810. The house at Strawberry Hill embodies more closely the Palladian villa form seen earlier at Battersea. One of a number of similar substantial villas built in the area around Petersburg, Strawberry Hill originally took the three-part form, with a central three-bay block flanked by one-story pavilions. A central doorway, now restored, is equipped with an elaborate architectural frontispiece.  It was built for William Barksdale, who acquired the site for 301 pounds in 1792 and sold it for 1500 pounds to William Haxall in 1800. 

Montview

Other villas lined the banks of the river to the southwest of the city. Two prominent Petersburg citizens, Donald McKenzie and Samuel Christian, built an elegant villa on the bluff above the river in the area just west of New Town. The house, appropriately known as Montview, appears to occupy the site of the home of Capt. Peter Jones (died 1726), third son of the first Peter Jones. The one-story, double-pile,  stuccoed brick house with a high basement dates from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century and features a five-bay facade, hipped roof, and entrance fanlight. It later became the home of successful merchant James Dunlop.  

As we have seen, rich merchants, mill-owners, and professionals often built houses on large, elevated tracts away from the noise and smell of industry and outside of the platted sections of the town. We have recognized that 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 Palladian villa at Battersea, and other houses like Robert Bolling’s more modest house at Bollingbrook, 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.