The neighborhoods where you dwell, the roads you drive, those odd assortments of syllables on the green highway signs — they all possess origin stories. A brief foray into our city’s history will assist you in seeing what is not always readily apparent.
Powerful Spirits
In May 1607, when Captain John Smith, Christopher Newport, Gabriel Archer and their company of two dozen “adventurers” landed their shallop near present-day downtown Richmond, they encountered a people who had lived here for more than 10,000 years.
A plinth of stones and a cross stand along the Canal Walk at the bottom of 12th Street to memorialize the place where Newport shoved a wooden cross into the sand and claimed for the British Crown a land already lived on by some 16,000 to 20,000 people. (Newport himself is the namesake of a city and a college on the coast.)
By that time, some 30 Tidewater tribes were loosely gathered under the leadership of Powhatan, or the “Mamanatowick,” which means “powerful spirits.,” The name indicates that Powhatan was regarded as a figure of both political and religious significance. He headed what the English termed “The Powhatan Confederacy.”
Powhatan was born as Wahunsunacawh, but adopted the name of his birthplace, by which he inherited his leadership. A county is given his name, and a statue honoring him stands amid Short Pump Town Center in western Henrico.
A historical plaque in Fulton was placed in error. (Photo by Justin Vaughan)
The Powhatan authority spanned at least three regional centers of administration and religion. The first was his homeplace. Another, Werowocomoco (“place of leadership”), was situated on the north side of the York River in Gloucester County. The people began gathering in the area around 1200 A.D. and stayed until the time of the Europeans; it’s where the captive John Smith first met Powhatan and one of his many children, daughter Pocahontas, in 1608. (A 1934 plaque marking “Powhatan Hill” in Fulton as their meeting place is incorrect and appears to be a case of memory drift). Today, Werowocomoco is an archaeological site under the stewardship of the National Park Service in collaboration with the Tribal Nations. In 2021, the nearby Gloucester County Visitors Center opened a permanent museum exhibit about the site.
By 1609, due to increasing difficulties with the Europeans, Powhatan moved his base to Orapax, near present-day Quinton in New Kent County; a hunting preserve in Goochland shares the name.
Christopher Newport’s arrival in the new world is memorialized on 12th Street, while Powhatan is honored with a statue in Short Pump as well as a namesake county. (Map image courtesy Library of Virginia; photos by Justin Vaughan)
Princess or Pawn?
A bartered bride who became a pawn in a game of international strategy, Pocahontas was also known as Matoaca, from which the Chesterfield County district is derived. She was a child of perhaps 12 years old when she famously rescued Captain John Smith in 1608; experts debate whether he was truly in danger or was undergoing a ceremonial testing. Regardless, Smith was freed and left Virginia the following year.
Pocahontas as depicted in a 1616 portrait engraving by Simon de Passe (Image courtesy Library of Congress)
In 1610 Pocahontas partnered with Koucom, perhaps one of Powhatan’s bodyguards, and they had a child. Then, in 1613, on what was supposed to be a visit among friends, Pocahontas was kidnapped and held captive in Henricus. There she underwent socioreligious indoctrination, and her name was changed to “Rebecca.”
Pocahontas met John Rolfe, a widower, at Henricus; they wed in 1614. With the marriage, the two cultures were united and, for a brief time, at peace. The Rolfes settled at his Varina plantation, 45 miles upstream from Jamestown. Their son Thomas, born in 1615, was the first recorded offspring of an Indigenous person and a European in Virginia.
During a tour of England organized by the Virginia Company to show off the Christianized “savage,” a living metaphor for colonization conversion, Pocahontas died of a disease for which she had no immunity. She is remembered in Richmond with a state park, a middle school and a parkway.
Rolfe’s accounts of his life and work in Virginia were published in anthologies by Sir Thomas Dale and John Smith. He married a third time, to Joane Peirce, and they had a daughter, Elizabeth. Rolfe died in March 1622 of unknown causes. He, too, is the namesake of a school and a road, as well as many businesses that line the latter.
First Persons
Rappahannock. The river is named for the tribe whose members still reside along its shores. The 125-year-old Rappahannock Oyster Co. and Grace Street restaurant boast the same name.
In 1983 the Rappahannocks were designated by the General Assembly as one of Virginia’s 11 historic tribes: Cheroenhaka (Nottoway), Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy, Mattaponi, Monacan, Nansemond, Nottoway, Pamunkey, Patawomeck, and the Upper Mattaponi. Their names are imbedded throughout the region.
Although the Chesapeake tribe died out after Powhatan apparently ordered their destruction because a tribal sage told him that they’d contest his rule, they are perhaps the best remembered thanks to the bay of the same name.
The Indigenous peoples here spoke a dialect of Algonquin. What is known of it today came from the European attempt at phonetic translation. Some of those words have come down to the present, among them pecan, opossum (“white animal”), roanoke (“thin shell bead money”), and “waugh,” which William Strachey notes was “their word of wonder.” You know it as “wow!”
Foundation Stone
“Shockoe” is a foundational description, as the East End valley is the city’s cradle. Historian Jeffery Ruggles analyzed the origins of the name in a 2010 monograph.
The Indigenous peoples used the phrase “Shacahocan” (as transcribed by the English linguist William Strachey) to describe a large, flat rock situated at the mouth of the creek where it flowed into the river. The outcropping presented a significant landmark and served as a pier for small craft during the colonial era. As historian Tyler Potterfield wrote in “Nonesuch Place,” “It marked the beginning of what the Powhatans called Paqwachowng, translated by Strachey as the Falls of the Kings River.” This River of Kings received the English name “James” after the reigning monarch King James I. (A later old salt batteaux captain pronounced it “Jeems.”)
Ruggles writes, “The same place on the river was known to the Powhatan and the English for different reasons — the English as the head of navigation, and the Powhatan as a place for fishing. The English heard the Powhatan name for this place and adopted it. They abbreviated it, attached it to a nearby creek, and eventually it became the name for their settlement on the north bank of the river.”
The William Byrd Title Book contains a survey illustrating a 1663 patent. The map identifies a branch as “Shaccoe Creek formerly called Chyinek.” Thus William Byrd II mentions in his diary of land surveying on Sept. 19, 1733, “When we got home, we laid the foundation of two large cities. One at Shacco’s, to be called Richmond, and the other at the point of Appomattox river, to be named Petersburg.” The latter name apparently derived from Byrd colleague Peter Jones III and his family’s trading post on the river, Peter’s Point.
Byrd Is the Word
The persistent story is that when William Byrd II surveyed the panorama from atop what is now known as Libby Hill, the uncanny similarity to the view from a similar promontory in Richmond upon Thames, west of London, made the name a natural fit. The American Society of Landscape Architects in 2012 named the Libby Hill overlook one of America’s most iconic landscapes. Conservationists have struggled to keep the view free of residential towers.
The immense wealth of the Byrd family grew through inheritance, industry and instigation. The foundations of their fortune came through lands inherited from the first Byrd’s uncle, Thomas Stegge (the name familiar as present-day Stegge Avenue and Stegge Court); the trade of furs and hides with native tribes; tobacco; property acquisition; and the importation of indentured servants and slaves, whom they also sold.
In 1727, by behest of the Virginia legislature, Byrd reluctantly ceded 50 of his 179,000 acres to establish a town at the roaring falls of the James River. He didn’t want competing businesses to arise or Virginia’s government horning in on his profits with taxes. But this slice of Byrd lands eventually became Richmond. Hence, the Byrd name is notably used by a splendid city park, the glorious Byrd Theatre in Carytown and a former hotel, which is now a residency center for seniors at Broad and Davis streets.
Byrd’s real estate partner William Mayo surveyed the region and large sections of Virginia. His grandson John built (and several times rebuilt) the Mayo’s Toll Bridge (the 14th Street bridge). The span crosses Mayo’s Island, recently purchased by Richmond for parkland through the guidance of conservationists.
The Naming of Names
A gazetteer of the Richmond region
Chesterfield: The county is named for Philip Stanhope, the fourth Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773), a Whig politician, diplomat, orator and composer of aphorisms and advice. The good earl made such statements as, “Absolute power can only be supported by error, ignorance and prejudice.” He also opposed the Stamp Act that caused so much trouble with the Colonies. The Chesterfield Apartments, at Franklin and Shafer streets, received the name from its builder, businessman J. Scott Parrish.
Fall Line: The collision of Piedmont Plateau and the Atlantic Coastal Plain created rapids in the James River, among them, Class IV for the experienced paddlers; waterfalls; and a rocky landscape suitable for fishing, sunbathing and artistic interpretation. Hence the Fall Line Kitchen & Bar and a forthcoming 43-mile north-south trail between Ashland and Petersburg.
William Foushee (Image courtesy Cook Collection, The Valentine)
William Foushee (1749-1824): A native Virginian of Huguenot descent, Foushee was a medical practitioner for the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War. On July 3, 1782, Richmond’s first administrators voted Foushee as the city’s first mayor. That Foushee’s peers held him in some regard was evidenced by how he held every other public and private post in city and state civic life that John Marshall did not. A downtown street is named for him, and following that lead, the well-regarded restaurant Chez Foushee.
Ware B. Gay (1845-1934): A Boston businessman, Gay owned and was president of the Richmond Coal Mining & Manufacturing Co. in the now-nonexistent village of Gayton near today’s Short Pump — an area replete with Gayton references. Gay also bought the Midlothian Mines (see below) during the late 19th century but never profitably ran them.
Lewis Ginter (1824-97): The third, and only lasting, fortune amassed by the New York Dutchman and Confederate commissary officer came from tobacco manufacturing and real estate development. His name is on the Ginter Park neighborhood; Lewis Ginter Botanical Park, where his niece Grace Arents resided at Bloemendaal house; and Lewis Ginter House on West Franklin Street, where the Virginia Commonwealth University Administrative Center has its offices. The tycoon bankrolled the Jefferson Hotel, but out of respect for Thomas Jefferson, Ginter directed that his own name not appear in or on the building. Pope Avenue in Bellevue is named for Ginter’s apprentice and business partner, John Pope, who predeceased him.
Glen Allen: Benjamin Bunbury Allen was a prominent mid-19th-century landowner in rural western Henrico County who married Susan Ann Sheppard of another landed family. He died in 1862. During the Civil War, Susan Allen maintained the local post office, which perhaps inspired locals to name the region for her.
Sir William Gooch (1681-1751): A British Army officer and Royal Lieutenant Governor of Virginia from 1727 to 1749, Gooch promoted the settlement of lands west of Virginia to buffer the colony from attacks by native peoples and French settlers from Ohio. He named Goochland, the first county to split off from Henrico — itself one of Virginia’s original eight shires — for himself. Gooch went on to broker peace between the warring Iroquois nations and authorize settlement of the Shenandoah Valley.
Henrico: The county adorns the city of Richmond like the bowtie of the late Thomas J. Bliley Jr., former U.S. Congressman, mayor of Richmond and president of the family’s funeral home business. The name “Henrico” was derived from Prince Henry Frederick of Wales, eldest son of James I and Anne of Denmark. One of the first eight shires, or counties, of Virginia, “Henryco” was established by Sir Thomas Dale in 1611 as a possible replacement for swampy Jamestown. Henricus didn’t last. In 1622, the paramount chief of the Indigenous people, Opechancanough, organized a massive attack against the Europeans along the Chesapeake and killed nearly a third of the English population. Henricus Historical Park is an open air museum that interprets native, colonial, Revolutionary and Civil War history.
Huguenot: When a group of French Protestants fleeing oppression came to Virginia in the 17th century, William Byrd II and others directed them to the western edges of the settlement — in a way to act as an early warning system if the Monacan tribe chose to attack. Surnames such as Agee, Chastain, Flournoy, Morrisset, Robiou, Talliaferro (Tolliver), and many others seen on business marquees and mailboxes derive from Huguenots — to say nothing of the eponymous bridge.
Jackson Ward: The original “Jackson” of Jackson Ward remains debated. Beginning in 1870 the district was gerrymandered by white city administrators into a majority Black neighborhood to restrict their voting power. It may have been the intention of city officials to humiliate Black people by giving their community the name of Confederate general Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, or the name may have carried over by convenience from James Jackson, proprietor of a beer garden at Second and Leigh streets during the 1820s. The 1835 Micajah Bates map of Richmond designates the area north of Broad (then “H”) Street as “Jackson’s Addition.” Given that other nearby wards were named for early presidents of the republic, such as Monroe, Madison and Jefferson, a tribute to Andrew Jackson may have been intended. Another contender is community entrepreneur and lawyer Giles B. Jackson (1853-1924), the first Black person to argue before Virginia State Supreme Court of Appeals, although Jackson was only at the beginning of his remarkable career when the ward was formed.
Manakin: The word is an English corruption of “Monocan,” a tribe that occupied lands west of Richmond and moved farther toward the Blue Ridge as Europeans advanced. The Powhatan people and Monacans had disputes during the 17th century. Manakin-Sabot in Goochland combines Monacan with the Huguenot French “Sabot” who settled there. The tribe is also memorialized in the name of Monacan High School in Chesterfield County.
Midlothian: Named for a coal mining center in Scotland, the town and district in southcentral Chesterfield were the location of the earliest coal mining in the United States, circa 1737; operations continued into the 1920s. A combination of deadly explosions and poor management eventually doomed the venture. Exhibits at the Mid-Lothian Mines Park detail the site’s history.
Powhite: The often mispronounced parkway name stems from a corruption or mistranslation of “Powhatan” on a 17th-century map, indicating the site of a tribal village as well as a creek. Richmonders, depending on their vintage, accent and preference, split on the “correct” pronunciation. If one leans toward first intentions, it’d be closer to “Pow-hite.”
Gen. Winfield Scott (Image courtesy Library of Congress)
Scott’s Addition: The name of this burgeoning district of breweries, restaurants and apartments comes from Winfield “Old Fuss and Feathers” Scott, an army general of Petersburg and Dinwiddie County. He married Richmonder Maria Mayo, and they inherited the 600-acre Hermitage estate (as in Hermitage Road) but never lived there. The property passed to their descendants and remained largely undeveloped until it was added to the city in 1901. Rezoned for industrial development in 1927, it became a factory and warehousing center, went semi-dormant for a time and then was discovered by artists, bands, craft beverage makers and developers. Although the area was declared a historic district in 2005, new apartment buildings have supplanted century-old worker’s cottages and other structures. A memoir by Kenneth Woodcock, “Scott’s Addition,” describes his rough-and-tumble upbringing in the neighborhood during the 1940s and ’50s.
Short Pump: According to the story, a tavern and stagecoach stop on the road west to the mountains had an unusually short handle — or perhaps the pump itself was short or was inconveniently located under a porch. Regardless, the establishment was known for its short pump and so, eventually, was the surrounding area of Henrico County. Pump Road is said to have led to the tavern.
Image courtesy New York Public Library
Triple Crossing: Richmond was the first place in North America where three railroad lines cross the same spot at different levels. Completed more than a century ago, the 36-foot-high crossing sits a scant quarter mile from Main Street Station and about a mile from the downtown outpost of Triple Crossing Beer.
Tuckahoe: The original Algonquin word described an edible starchy wetlands plant — although without proper preparation it may cause burning and swelling of the mouth, throat and fingers. Now a district in western Henrico County, schools and other public places bear the name. An estate now called Historic Tuckahoe was constructed in Goochland County during 1730 to 1740 for the influential Randolph family. Young Thomas Jefferson attended a one-room schoolhouse there, which remains.
Varina: The eastern district of Henrico County takes its name from the strain of tobacco created in 1612 by planter John Rolfe, using illegally obtained seeds from Bermuda blended with the native-grown. The mixture proved more palatable to the English taste, and it’s argued his ingenuity saved the straitened Virginia Colony.
