Executive Editor Tina Eshleman and a team of reporters deliver a love letter to the James River Park System this month through the people who protect it, share it with others and use it daily.
When my parents moved to Chesterfield County from Columbus, Ohio, nearly 40 years ago, visiting the James River’s banks was not on anyone’s list of things to do. Back then, the river was in bad health, making national headlines for Kepone contamination, and the entire tidal river was closed to any kind of fishing.
In 1976, a group of neighbors came together to form the James River Association, and since then they have worked to restore the health of the river. The JRA was formed only four years before the arrival of Ralph White, who became the director of the James River Park System, which opened in 1972. He served the park for 32 years, retiring in 2013.
White is one of my personal Richmond heroes for his ask-for-forgiveness-later attitude, his devotion and protection of the park, and the way he shared his love for its banks and creatures, especially with children. When White left in 2013, some 750,000 visitors were flocking to the park system’s 550 acres. That visitation mirrors the river’s significance to the city.
Forty years ago, visiting the James River’s banks was not on anyone’s list of things to do.
“We used to be just history. It is not what newcomers associate the city with,” White told RVANews in 2012 as he pointed to the city’s logo on the side of his truck — a logo that has the river running through it. “This is what brands the city.”
My adult life has been anchored by the James. As a single woman moving back to Richmond in the 1990s, I purchased my first home in Stratford Hills and had the river within walking distance.
After marrying, my husband and I took a detour to North Side, but a magnetic force pulled us back to another “South Bank” neighborhood, Forest Hill. And there we’ve remained for nearly 20 years, enjoying the distant train whistles, the beauty of the seasons as we cross the Nickel Bridge daily and — thanks to OG naturalist White and all those neighbors who banded together 40 years ago — the trails, the footbridges and habitats that were restored or added.
When Jesse Reynolds, head of the city’s parks and recreation department in the 1970s, was asked to sign documents that would create the James River Park System, White said that Reynolds responded with: “Who the hell wants a bunch of weeds and snakes?”
A huge debt of gratitude is owed to those who embraced all those weeds and snakes and saw into the future what could be.
