Bill Martin (Photo by Monica Escamilla)
In the portico of Monumental Church is a funerary installation for the victims of the Richmond Theatre Fire of Dec. 26, 1811. The avant-neoclassical structure, built on the site of the disaster, is a perpetual memorial. Atop a marble bier-like monument, inscribed with the names of the 72 known dead, is a large, symbolic urn.
The memorial at 12th and East Broad streets was a regular stop of William J. “Bill” Martin, for 32 years the director of The Valentine museum, who often doubled as a tour guide of Richmond’s historical sites. On Saturday, just three blocks away, he was struck by a car and fatally injured. He died on Sunday at VCU Medical Center, aged 71.
Martin loved giving tours of the city. He would pause at Monumental Church to delight in one of the oddities of Richmond’s history: After one of the great tragedies of the 19th century, it seems grief transcended racial barriers — the memorial is also an interracial crypt. Along with the mostly white theatergoers, it includes a half-dozen enslaved people who also perished in the fire.
Robert Mills, who designed Monumental, knew his classical funereal motifs. In ancient times, this would’ve been a cinerary, a place for human ashes, and a lachrymatory, a vessel to receive the tears of a bereaved community.
The community that knew Martin, and those who followed him on tours, heard him speak and chuckled over his occasional double entendres, now share that grief in common. No man is an island, John Donne reminded us, but each one of us part of the continent. And the universal currents swept away an important chunk of ours.
This year has seemed hungry for some of the best of us. Richmond magazine’s December issue included a partial list of notable deaths, but due to the mechanics of monthly publishing, we noted with an online remembrance the passing of architectural historian and critic Edwin Slipek, and now, some 10 days later, Martin, the city’s foremost historiographer. If they could, the two men would have something to say about that proximity. The last time I corresponded with Martin was when he graciously replied to my query about Slipek’s death.
I met Martin back in the early 1990s, when he lived in Petersburg and worked as that city’s tourism director and unofficial spokesperson. He would, and did, with gusto and humor, take you around to point out Petersburg’s assorted attributes and historical sites. Back then, I wrote for The Petersburg Progress-Index. Martin shared numerous on-the-record stories, and some that decidedly weren’t. He was one of those “sources” that we in these peculiar trenches need.
Then, I got hired by what was then the bimonthly Richmond Surroundings, from which our present publication evolved, and Martin joined the staff of The Valentine as its director of marketing and public relations. He and I have been at our respective jobs for 32 years. In that time, it’d be misleading to say I knew him well; we were long-term acquaintances. He was effusive in public and fastidious about his privacy. I respected him for those qualities.
Martin was at The Valentine when everything almost went dark in the mid-1990s, after a failed expansion of the museum on the riverfront known as the Valentine Riverside at Tredegar Iron Works. An idea that in retrospect seems nearly prescient, given today’s presence of the American Civil War Museum, Brown’s Island events, the Richmond Folk Festival and the T. Tyler Potterfield Memorial Bridge (oh, and that amphitheater), proved ahead of its time.
Sheriff’s deputies, some with tears in their eyes (and, no, I’m not making that up), began coming into the museum’s collection and tagging pieces for dispersal through auction.
But Martin happened. Out of chaos, he brought order, and, like a miner with a lamp on his head following a cave-in, he led The Valentine back into the light of day. Under his guidance, the museum grew and changed with the times but remained true to its mission — not only serving as a custodian of our fair burg’s past, but also responsible for interrogating our present informed by what came before, interpreting what Richmond is and how we got this way.
Bill Martin cellar tour
Bill Martin gives the author an impromptu “cellar-to-the-dome” tour of The Valentine museum as its recent expansion and renovation neared conclusion in 2022. (Photo by Harry Kollatz Jr.)
Its work was sometimes controversial, but audiences and museumgoers alike learned things about their town that they most likely wouldn’t have otherwise. On Martin’s watch, The Valentine became less of a fusty archive and much more of a dynamic community resource.
Martin opened the place to me for the releases of my books “True Richmond Stories: Historic Tales From Virginia’s Capital” (2007) and “Richmond in Ragtime: Socialists, Suffragists, Sex & Murder” (2008), and he wrote an introduction to the former. The Valentine then described itself as the “Richmond History Center” to avoid the term “museum,” to which some potential audiences are allergic. Now it’s just The Valentine.
In that intro, Martin termed me as “a great partner” of the center, and that relationship has held up for the past three decades. I am beyond indebted to the museum and staff, thanks to my persistent need for information and, importantly, illustrations and photographs for my Flashback column in this magazine and numerous other forays of a historical nature.
I eagerly accepted when curator Meg Hughes, now acting director, asked if I’d like to provide historical context for John Henley’s photographic essay about the remaining city portions of the James River and Kanawha Canal, called “West by Water.” The September launch went well, and there are photographs of me there, with both Martin and Slipek attending. Seeing them feels strange now. We are all just flickers in the light, and sometimes we stand still for pictures.
In the coming days, there’ll be eloquent encomiums about the life and legacy of Bill Martin. They will recall his impish, almost Peck’s Bad Boy character when revealing hidden seams of the city’s historic geology and his humor, kindness, and deep and abiding affection for Richmond, which is not his hometown. He came from Culpeper and went to Virginia Tech.
I last encountered him in November, at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond’s Craft + Design show, held in the magnificent Main Street Station. He broke away from a conversation and came over to say, “I need to thank you.” I chuckled and asked, “For what?” And he half-grinned, answering, “For everything you do.”
I replied, “Likewise.” And we laughed.
