This Grove Avenue house was originally part of Home Place. (Photo by Jay Paul)
WHAT: Home Place neighborhood
WHERE: North from Ellwood and Colonial avenues to the houses facing the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts on Grove Avenue
WHY IT MATTERS: George H.A. Ball and his Home Place neighborhood helped guide the development of Richmond’s West End/Museum District at a time when it was not even part of the city. Now the area is an important piece of Richmond culture and tourism.
Just west of The Fan lies a residual suburb of Richmond that was designed to thrive as an independent neighborhood but has been enveloped by apartment buildings and row houses west of the Boulevard. Located within what is now called the Museum District, the historically familiar group of homes once went by another name: Home Place. Developer George H.A. Ball developed and named the neighborhood at the end of the 19th century, though he did not live to see it become as architecturally significant as it is today.
Ball was following the lead of other visionary developers in Richmond at the time. Lewis Ginter’s Sherwood Park neighborhood and James Barton’s Barton Heights provide similar examples of pioneering developments during Richmond’s streetcar suburb boom of the late 19th century.
The houses of Home Place were offered with the extravagance of complete customization through illustrated advertisements Ball ran in The Richmond Dispatch and other publications. In the beginning, his homes were built luxuriously, as can still be seen in the homes on Grove Avenue facing the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (a few of which are now owned by the museum). These castle-like structures of stone with turrets and stained glass were outfitted with windmill-driven water pumps, as they were outside of the city’s utility network at the time they were built.
These windmills were a particular point of interest, and only one photograph of them survives, found in “Art Work of Richmond,” published in 1897, featuring the neighborhood at a time when each home retained its original windmill. Clean water was a hurdle to contend with for a small suburban developer, and the windmills were an innovative solution, albeit a short-lived one. These windmill-driven pumps would have required a great deal of labor to maintain and would not have lasted long once the area was annexed by Richmond, given that the city pump house made clean water more easily accessible.
The advertisements Ball ran painted a picture of a suburban paradise with all the amenities of the city on the horizon. He even promised in an ad that one of the houses was already “sold to one of our State’s prominent citizens.” He neglected to credit his architects but instead promoted homes by “the most eminent designers.” Retired Virginia Commonwealth University art history professor Charles Brownell sees the hallmarks of noted local architect D. Wiley Anderson in the structures, and he was active and advertising his services for hire in Richmond at the time, but Home Place’s architectural pedigree remains a mystery.
Though Ball didn’t live to see his work and vision come to fruition — he died in 1898 in what the Dispatch called apoplexy, known today as a stroke — he helped guide the evolution of the city of Richmond alongside contemporaries such as Lewis Ginter and John Dooley. The Home Place development likely influenced the city’s 1906 annexation of that part of Henrico — the first of many in that direction. Within a few decades, the VMFA was founded and became a major feature of the city right next door. By that time, the footprint of the independent neighborhood was long gone but not yet forgotten.
