Pocahontas Parkway’s 672-foot bridge spans I-95 and the James River. (Photo by Joe Mahoney courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch)
When the Route 895 toll road, or as it was more romantically named, the Pocahontas Parkway, opened during the summer of 2002, Jeff Caldwell provided public information for the Virginia Department of Transportation. “Not only was this a new green-space highway, it was one of the early public-private transportation projects,” he recalls. “Our job then was to educate folks about what it was, where it was, and most folks didn’t have an EZPass for the tolls, so we needed to explain how that worked. And then, once built, this ghost thing came up.”
Caldwell in August 2002 accompanied Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter Chris Dovi to the parkway’s main toll plaza and the impressive 672-foot bridge over Interstate 95 and the James River, high enough to allow the safe passage of oceangoing container ships traveling to and from the Port of Richmond. “We spent all night on the bridge and didn’t see a single ghost,” Caldwell recalls. Dovi interviewed motorists, residents and tollbooth operators who nonetheless shared their spectral experiences.
A trucker filed a report about seeing three breech-clothed Indians alongside the roadway holding torches, and “he let loose a blast from the truck’s horn to warn off two more torch-wielding Indians standing ahead of him,” illuminated by the truck’s headlights. State troopers took reports of hearing what they called “Indian drums” and “the mingled whoops, shouts and cries of seemingly dozens of voices.”
Were these acoustic tricks played by a rumored nearby illegal dog fighting ring, or ducks and geese winging their way back to the river?
Deanna Beacham of the Nansemond Tribe told Dovi that any protest about the road’s completion could interfere with federal recognition of the tribe (which came in 2017). “We’re still here as place names,” Beacham told Dovi. “We became rivers and streets and roads and communities. Why shouldn’t people see physical manifestations of that?”
The “Pocahaunted Parkway” became international news. Caldwell, once a Richmond magazine writer and now an associate vice president of communications for HCA Healthcare, describes those few weeks as the strangest of his VDOT career: “I never anticipated staying up until the middle of the night to be interviewed by the BBC about ghosts on a highway in Virginia.”
Capt. John Smith’s 1612 map showing the territory where Route 895 was built nearly 400 years later (Image courtesy Library of Congress)
The parkway created a beltway around Richmond by linking the Chippenham Parkway and I-95 on the west side of the river to Laburnum Avenue and I-295 on the east bank. Officials touted the road as a shortcut to Richmond International Airport and as a commuter route in anticipation of proposed residential developments in Varina: 2,770 residential units at Tree Hill and 3,209 houses at Wilton on the James.
The parkway constituted the state’s first major effort under the Public Private Transportation Act of 1995 (PPTA). The legislation, passed by the General Assembly at the behest of then-Gov. George F. Allen, cleared the way for attracting private investors to finance public roads. The theory was that taxpayers would take little or no risk.
The Texas-based mega project engineers and builders Fluor Daniel/Morrison Knudsen formed a nonprofit limited liability corporation, the Pocahontas Parkway Association. They contracted with VDOT in 1998. The agreement required $354 million in tax-exempt bonds and $27 million in state-backed loans and federal funds.
“The trick there is that people argue if it’s a subsidy or not,” explains Jonathan Gifford, director of George Mason University’s Center for Transportation Public-Private Partnership Policy. “They issued municipal bonds, which were tax-exempt, making the cost lower than if they were taxable.”
Financial consultant Jim Regimbal of Fiscal Analytics served as a transportation analyst for the state Senate Finance Committee at the time. He viewed the road as a success of the PPTA.
Regimbal, however, didn’t quite get the rationale for 895. “The need, as what’s described, is to create development around the airport,” he says (the 1.6-mile airport connector was delayed until 2011). “But who’s going to pay the tolls when there’s a free road — 295, 5 miles one way, and 64, 5 miles the other way?”
Some 660 workers built the Pocahontas Parkway. Two died in the process. The collapse of a 48-foot-high tower of reinforcing rods on the bridge crushed Israel Hernandez Cruz on Dec. 19, 1999, on his 27th birthday. On April 17, 2001, a 500-pound support beam fell from a crane and killed Isaias Martinez Hernandez, 36. He left a wife and three young children in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Photo courtesy Virginia Department of Transportation
What sparked the later fantastical tales likely came from the College of William & Mary Center for Archaeological Research’s June 2000 report, which was commissioned by VDOT. The work provided due diligence to determine what lay in the path of this new interstate-grade highway cutting through southeastern Henrico County’s Varina district.
The fields and forests interrupted by the parkway ran through lands occupied for centuries by indigenous peoples — and during Colonial times by the Randolph family of Wilton and their enslaved workers.
Findings included ceramic and other artifacts dating from the Middle Archaic Period (6500-3500 B.C.), as well as remnants of a “relatively small hamlet or a portion of a dispersed community” occupied by 17th-century Native Americans. These are likely the villages/territories of Powhatan and Arrohateck as identified by Capt. John Smith’s map of Virginia published in 1612.
William Randolph III lived in Wilton for barely a decade. He died at 37, and none of his three subsequent male descendants lived past 40. During the American Revolution, the house served as a headquarters for Marquis de Lafayette, and Continental soldiers bivouacked on the grounds. After 1859, the house went through a succession of owners until 1932, when foreclosure and zoning changes endangered Wilton.
This prompted The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Virginia to dismantle and move Wilton 15 miles to West Cary Street Road, where it opened as a house museum. The former Wilton lands remained primarily agricultural.
The 2008 economic downturn, and public opposition, scotched the Tree Hill and Wilton subdivisions. The lack of toll revenue caused 895’s ownership to change, first through Australia-based Transurban and followed briefly by Pennsylvania’s DBi Services. Spanish-owned Globalvia assumed management in 2016. The road is privately held by Pocahontas Parkway Operations LLC, under VDOT agreement. PPO states that the highway is used by more than 6 million vehicles each year.
One of the parkway’s recent users is Varina resident John Brooks, director of facilities management for The Doorways, a hospital hospitality operation in Richmond. “The bridge is really cool,” he says, “though I think it’s more interesting underneath.”
