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.