No images of John Bell’s estate exist today, but the architect who designed Bellville also designed the Wickham House (pictured above), and it’s likely the structures possessed many similarities.
The local wags of 1812 called the place that stood amid present Ryland Street “Bell’s Folly.”
The Scottish native and Petersburg commission merchant John Bell did well for himself and his spouse, Mary Ann Walker. Bell sought to establish a branch office and, so it seems, his familial seat, in Richmond. It made sense because his brother-in-law, mills owner Philip Haxall, built his estate, Columbia, at the northeastern corner of Lombardy and West Grace streets.
The 36-acre property for the home, named Bellville, ran from the Richmond Turnpike (today Broad Street) to Westham Road (Park Avenue). Bell wanted to display his perceived social station, and he selected Boston-based master builder Alexander Parris for the job.
Parris recalled receiving the commission to “plan and superintend the building of a large dwelling house” for Bell in Richmond. “During my stay there, I planned and superintended the building of a dwelling house for John Wickham, Esquire,” he wrote.
Parris took up residence on the Bellville grounds. From 1810 to 1812, he directed the construction of that house and the Court End mansion of New York state native and in-demand lawyer John Wickham, his family and more than a dozen enslaved people.
The Wickham’s flying spiral central stair and the grand garden-facing bay indicate what Bell wanted for his estate.
While here, Parris also designed the elegant neoclassical Executive Mansion for Virginia’s governors in Capitol Square.
Bell, in a well-known Virginia tradition, wanted to live like a laird. The vagaries of commerce and markets, however, can make sport of the plans of land-rich and cash-poor — and self-aggrandizing — gentry.
Drew St. J. Carneal, in his 1996 Fan District history, describes how a creditor inventoried the opulent decor and appointments Bell installed in his dream home: mahogany furnishings, fine china and crystal, an expensive “Piano Forte Musick,” two “Shakespear” prints and a painting of St. John. Another observer remembered a “magnificent chandelier of cut glass” that dominated the main hall. What Bellville may have looked like can only be discerned from Parris’ other surviving Richmond houses. No drawings of “Bell’s Folly,” as Carneal coined it, are known to exist.
John Bell
A somewhat clumsy description appears in the Oct. 11, 1841, issue of the Richmond Courier. A double flight of curved marble stairs led to the entranceway. “The foundation walls were of immense thickness, the first floor resting on arches like the casements of a fortification,” the Courier writer said in an attempt to visualize the building for readers. The “ascending walls went up a massive inclosure, upon which rested a heavily built and substantially braced roof of stalwart timbers. Underneath the dining room floor and connected by narrow stairways were solidly constructed wine cellars and other receptacles for household goods of value.”
The cellar and receptacles contained 20 dozen bottles of Madeira and 60 gallons “of old rum.” The drink may have eased (or caused) some of the financial pain that followed.
While Bell didn’t end up completely losing his place, family kept him housed for a while. William Haxall, the brother and business partner of Bell’s brother-in-law Philip, bought Bellville. The Bells stayed there in their straitened circumstances until December 1816, when the Haxalls sold the mansion and 20 acres to John Mayo Jr.
The Mayos were one of Richmond’s first families and prospered from investments out of the tolls taken on their bridge to Manchester, known as the 14th Street Bridge. The Mayos then lived nearby in a rambling country villa called the Hermitage (as in the road name).
The Bells packed up for Coutts’ Addition, north of East Broad. They moved into a new brick house at what became 506 E. Leigh St., which they rented from William Mann on the terms of five years for an annual rent of $400. Anglican minister William Coutts profited more from operating a Richmond-to-Manchester ferry than preaching and assembled property that the city annexed (hence, the term “addition”).
Mann, serving as deputy marshal of Virginia, purchased the entire square along Leigh in 1810. He placed the residence in the square’s middle, surrounded by gardens. That site is today buried beneath the Altria Center for Research and Technology and kitty-corner from the bunker-like Coliseum entrance where Leigh Street slides beneath Fifth Street.
Bell’s wife, Mary Ann Walker
Despite the accommodation, Bell’s debts overwhelmed him and, around 1820, he died broke.
Meanwhile, the Mayo fortunes rose. Bellville suited Philip Jr.’s sense of advancement. The place was suited for entertainment and there on May 11, 1817, his eldest daughter Maria DeHart was wed. Maria by accounts fit the designation of a “belle”: desirable for her appearance and connection to wealth, ability to play with notable skill the harp and harpsichord and knack for foreign languages.
The groom, already a national military hero, was Dinwiddie County native Brevet Major Gen. Winfield Scott. The newlyweds moved to a Mayo house in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, closer to Scott’s Northeastern command.
Of the Scotts’ seven children, both sons died young as did two daughters. Maria, separated from her frequently campaigning military husband, suffered depression and sickness. In the 1830s, she chose to live abroad for health reasons until she died in Rome in 1862. They and their eldest daughter, Cornelia, are buried at West Point Cemetery, New York.
Descendants inherited the Richmond properties that became Scott’s Addition. Belleville Street, the section’s westernmost thoroughfare, may have been named with either a misspelled sense of residential history or an appreciation of Maria. The legacy, knowingly or not, continues on the street with the 2024 completion of the six-story, 125-unit Belleville Apartments designed by Richmond's 510 Architects.
Philip Mayo died in May 1818 at age 58. His widow, Abigail, remained in the “palatial mansion” of Bellville, as the Courier described it, until an 1841 fire. The former Mayo estate of Hermitage went disused and burned in 1857. Later there arose the Union or Broad Street Station, now home of the Science Museum of Virginia.
The place in Coutts’ Addition to which the Bells retreated entered Richmond lore as the haunted Hawes House with appearances of a certain “Grey Lady.”
