I have nothing much to add about this photo, just that I surprised to walk by the United States’s national shrine to Walsingham. A little bit of a connection to Norfolk…. It was blessed in 1941 and there’s more information about it at https://bedeva.org/our-lady-of-walsingham.
To save me retyping it, here’s some history of the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg. This could perhaps have been as well known internationally as Harvard or Yale, but its fortunes were intertwined with those of Williamsburg, which started to decline from the late eighteenth century when the state capital was moved to Richmond. It’s still an important institution and has around 9,500 students, with its first post-colonial chancellor being George Washington and, perhaps more intriguingly, its chancellor between 1993 and 2000 was Margaret Thatcher.
The Brafferton, which is the second oldest building at the college and it was constructed to house the Indian School which was to provide a free education to ‘western Indians’. The legacy which funded this was from Sir Robert Boyle and the trustees purchased Brafferton Manor in Yorkshire, using some of the rents to support this building in Williamsburg.
The statue of Norborne Berkeley, Baron de Botetourt, who was the Governor of the Colony of Virginia between 1768 and 1770 (and he had been the MP for Gloucestershire between 1741 and 1763). This one is a copy placed here in 1958 to protect the original statue, which stood here from 1801 other than when it was moved for its own protection during the American Civil War.
Pesky students no doubt.
After a visit to Golden Corral and the Precarious Beer Project, it was time to get the Amtrak train back to Richmond. Williamsburg railway station, or technically the Williamsburg Transportation Center, has been here since 1873, but the current structure is from 1935 and was funded by John D. Rockefeller Jr as part of the Colonial Williamsburg project.
The platform area and I did take a video of the train coming in, but I’ll upload those all later on.
I was just relieved that the storm the previous evening hadn’t blocked the line.
Note the little yellow step, that’s the boarding stairs.
The staff member getting ready to move the boarding stairs into position. It’s not exactly an air bridge is it?
On we get using the provided boarding steps.
Better photos of the inside of Amtrak trains are coming from my other trips, but this will have to do for now. Spacious and comfortable, with access to power and plenty of seats available.
Arriving back into Richmond on schedule.
The Holocaust Museum that I had visited a few days before.
And safely back into Richmond Main Street. My plan was to spend an hour or so looking at some historic sites around the city before moving onto my hotel which was near to the other railway station in the city, Staples Mill.
This was the house that was the executive mansion of the Confederate President Jefferson Davis between August 1861 and 2 April 1865, purchased by the Confederate government from Lewis Dabney Crenshaw who had used it as his residence in Richmond. If history had gone differently and the United States had broken into two permanently, this could be where the President of the Southern States would be residing today (albeit with a lot more security).
Davis not only lived in the property, but he had his government offices on the second floor of the building. Colonel Burton Harrison, the private secretary to Davis, also lived in the property so that he could be close at hand. Two of Davis’s children, William and Varina Anne, were born in this property, and one, Joseph, died here on 30 April 1864 after suffering a fall.
On 4 April 1865, just two days after Davis had left the building for the final time (or more fled), US President Abraham Lincoln came to the building, which was just ten days before he was to be assassinated in Washington DC. Lincoln had been visiting to discuss with leading politicians from Virginia how to rebuild the damaged state, but had deliberately only visited the first floor as he felt it was inappropriate to visit the private residence of Lewis.
A heritage board about the building, which notes that it was nearly demolished in the late nineteenth century and it then became the Confederate Museum between 1896 and 1976. Today, the building is still a museum of the Civil War although the VCU hospital now surrounds it on all sides. I thought it was fascinating to see where the decisions were made on behalf of the Confederate states and also to known that Abraham Lincoln visited the property.
This is a bit like Charing Cross in London which is defined as the centre of London and from where distances are officially measured. This stone in Richmond was placed here in 1929 and it marks the measurement of distances for the roads in the state of Virginia.
Noting that it’s the zero milestone.
It was donated by Jonathan Bryan, the son of local newspaper editor Joseph Bryan and Isobel Bryan. It’s something different at least and he got a good location for his stone, right next to the Capitol building.
The Virginia Executive Mansion was constructed in 1813 to designs created by Alexander Parris and it was built by Christopher Tompkins. The first resident was Governor James Barbour and it’s the oldest occupied governor’s mansion in the United States.
The Capitol Building is conveniently just a thirty second walk away.
I poked my phone through the barriers to get the top photo, but the security team didn’t seem too concerned. Although, to be fair, they had a put a load of history signs up at the gate so they wouldn’t have been surprised to see someone standing there. Over time the building has been faffed around with, but in 1989 they decided to reverse some of the changes to make it look more like it did in the early nineteenth century.
One sign is slightly harder to read since it’s in the middle of a bush.
There are three identical versions of this statue, this one is opposite the main railway station in Richmond and the others are in Cotonou, Benin and Liverpool, marking the triangular nature of the slave trade. There’s more about this project at https://broadbent.studio/reconciliation-triangle.
They picked this location in Richmond as it’s opposite the former slave market at Shockoe Bottom where over 350,000 people were sold into slavery between 1830 and 1865. Richmond has previously dealt with this part of its past in quite a clumsy manner, with no original buildings surviving and the site long since turned into a car park. This statue is part of an attempt to correct that situation and to tell the story of the city’s slave past. There’s still more to be done though, there’s meant to be an informational sign at the former slave market itself, but that has apparently disappeared and its use as a car park isn’t really ideal.
They’ve also created a walking trail, of which this is one of the signs. I didn’t have time to walk it, but it’s three miles in length and there’s more information about it at https://www.rva.gov/media/21606.
This memorial is located on the grounds of the state Capitol, having been unveiled here in July 2008. The memorial was designed by Stanley Bleifeld (1924-2011) and cost $2.8 million which was funded by public subscription.
The memorial is beautifully designed and has eighteen different leaders or participants from the civil rights movement. Certainly very eye-catching and there are a couple of quotes on it, including this “it seemed like reaching for the moon”, from the civil rights leader Barbara Rose Johns (1935–1991).
And the Virginia Executive Mansion in the background. There’s more about the project at http://vacivilrightsmemorial.org/, although that site hasn’t been updated for some time and indeed before they had completed the fundraising.
The Confederate Memorial Chapel was built in 1887 and the architect was Marion J Dimmock. It was designed to be the place of worship for those in the RE Lee Camp Confederate Soldiers’ Home which was for those involved in the Civil War who had no other means of financial support. There were 1,700 funeral services here over the decades after each former soldier passed away, with the home not closing until 1941 when the last veteran died. That must have been an odd arrangement for him, especially if he had attended the other 1,700 funeral services with the number of attendees no doubt continuing to decline over the years.
The interior of the church, which was saved from the demolition of the rest of the complex in the 1940s and was restored in the 1960s. The church was originally constructed by Joseph Wingfield and it was funded by donations from Civil War survivors.
The altar which is all quite basic, with the church having two aisles.
Some of the stained glass in the church which dates to the late nineteenth century. I like that the building has been kept and it’s now in the grounds of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, so it gets a fair number of visitors from there who are wandering around the grounds.
And a reminder of the military connection.
I got a little enthusiastic in terms of the number of photos that I took at the Hollywood Cemetery and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, so my next priority on my Richmond tour was to find somewhere to charge my phone. And this looked like a suitable location on W Cary Street.
The service counter and I have to confess that ordering coffee in the United States is far more complex than in the UK. Coffee is just as often served cold as it is hot, so I have to remember to order a hot latte, then remember that regular milk is not a useful answer as there are multiple dairy and non-dairy options, with other questions usually coming in about how long I want things to be brewed for, whether I want something dripped and so on. Anyway, I ordered an Americano as that means I don’t have to answer lots of questions and potentially get muddled up.
One thing that I dislike, of which there are actually many, is when coffee shops ask for your name when taking the order. It constantly fails as a process and I like that many locations now have alternative ways of dealing with that. A number strikes me as far better, it gets rid of any chance of mis-spelling or mis-pronouncing names. And, of course, the system failed here with three of the five orders I saw having a disconnect between the name they called out and the name that the customer was expecting to hear. I never heard my name, so goodness knows what they’d been calling out. I stood and looked confused, in my best British way, and the server asked what drink I had ordered. That was a better system, she then found my drink.
There were charging points all over the place in the coffee shop, which was mostly busy with a slightly younger clientele reading, working or meeting with friends. The coffee was entirely acceptable, but I mostly pleased to have a full charge again. There were a variety of seating options including sofas, tables inside and outside as well as the high benches which I like. There was also wi-fi available to save my data and it’s the sort of laid-back and on-trend place that I could have stayed in for some time if I wasn’t mid-way through trying to rush around the museums of Richmond.
It was also handily located near to the bus stop so that I could get back into the centre of Richmond, all for free.
