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.