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| 985 Commerce Street (demolished) |
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House and store on Water Street (Grove Ave.), Old Petersburg,
Plat of lots of estate of William H. Williams, 1860. Probably began as
a double house.
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Brick was used in the center of the city but frame construction remained the most popular choice in other sections. The Virginia building tradition gave form to the housing built in all sections of Petersburg until the second quarter of the twentieth century, when popular housing forms replaced the regional vernacular. Petersburg dwellings were manifested on a variety of scales depending on the wealth and position of the occupant. Many were constructed by speculative builders on previously undeveloped lots. It is likely, absent the pressure to subdivide in the urban center, that lot sizes played a large role in determining the shape and form of buildings and their relationships with each other. Similar vernacular buildings employing a limited number of forms were constructed throughout the city for residents at every position on the social hierarchy. These forms were materialized at a variety of scales, ranging from tiny framed houses for industrial workers and free blacks to large brick dwellings for substantial merchants.
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Petersburg's famous Trapezium Hose on Short Market Street has an oddly shaped plan. While it has long been thought that the side passage-plan house was built in this manner for superstitious reasons, it is more than likely that the pre-existing shape of the lot, resulting from the differing angles of Market and High streets, is the real reason for the trapezoidal shape of the house. |
Petersburg’s basic residential form coalesced by the early nineteenth century in the form known as the side-passage-plan, in which one or two rooms are flanked on one side by a narrow passage, usually containing the stair if there is an upper floor. In town centers, these buildings usually housed a store on the first floor and a two-story dwelling for the proprietor on the upper floor or floors. The same side-passage plan was used for independent residential buildings and the occupants walked from the periphery to their places of employment.
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| House/stores once lined the entire length of Sycamore Street. |
The stores in the city center were three stories in height, so that shop-keepers were able to manifest the full number and the same arrangement of rooms as a conventional two-story house. These upper rooms matched in comfort and elegance the detached houses of well-off landowners elsewhere. The domestic life of early nineteenth-century Petersburg was thus largely lived at the second- and third-floor levels, slightly removed from immediate contact with the street and effectively forming a piano nobile. Many buildings were equipped with balconies from which to view activity in the street below.
In some cases, rows of such structures were extended to six or more units. The side-passage type appeared in Virginia towns in the eighteenth-century and is found in rural locations from the later part of the century. A majority of row houses built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Petersburg were double houses.
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| Typical double worker house. |
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.
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| 1879 Beer's Map of Pride's Field showing subdivision of large lots into very small ones for one- or two-room double houses. |
One 1/2-story, double, single-cell dwellings were built on tiny lots subdivided from the original half-acre lots in Pride’s Field. Eight twenty-five-foot-wide lots could be created out of one. Based on the 1879 Beer’s Map dozens of these were built and rented by individual landlords on the street near the canal. Similarly, one-1/2-story double, side-passage-plan houses for workers appeared along Low and Plum streets in Old Petersburg. The original 100-foot lots were divided in two or four and the double house straddled the central line separating each pair of lots. 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.
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| HABS drawing of John Smith's Row (1837-38) on High Street, one of three multi-unit sets of row houses built in that area in the mid- to late-nineteenth century Petersburg. |
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| Plan of typical side-passage-plan unit in Smith's Row on High Street (HABS). |
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 city.
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"Synoptic Table" showing the traditional housing types found in Petersburg.
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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 almost 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.
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| Center-passage-plan houses on West High Street |
In addition to the house in its single and double form, other house forms appeared in Petersburg 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.
Antebellum houses tended to have side gable roofs with the sort of rake boards and box cornices associated with early to mid-nineteenth-century domestic architecture in the region. A few had low hipped roofs. The majority, built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have shallow shed roofs. Chimneys were built on the exterior end walls, along the central party wall, and, most often, in a position between the front and rear rooms of each unit. Houses of all periods have one-story porches that shelter the first-floor front of the entire building. While earlier porch detailing can vary greatly, by the final, mature form, the porch is usually supported on slender turned posts with decorative sawn brackets at the top and a turned balustrade in between. The hipped porch roof is often covered with standing-seam metal and given a kicked or concave profile.
To be continued with Part Six
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