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