Lee Monument, c. 1917-19 (Cook Collection, The Valentine)
This curious, northward-looking image of the Robert E. Lee Monument from a century ago may be the work of the Cook Studios, whose photographs are the subject of a retrospective exhibition up through Nov. 10 at The Valentine museum. Alongside that show is a boisterous presentation of ideas, “General Demotion/General Devotion,” for reinterpreting Monument Avenue — which wasn’t much to speak of when this picture was taken.
Let’s step, for a moment, into the Richmond of the photograph, circa 1917-19. The mythic Lee seems to review the serried ranks of a tobacco plant regiment. The unidentified African-American man squinting toward the camera stands as though an officer guiding the formation.
The statue occupies land formerly owned by the heirs of William C. Allen, a brickmason turned developer.
After the high Confederate-tinged pomp of the May 29, 1890, unveiling of the monument — which John Mitchell Jr., editor-publisher of the African-American newspaper Richmond Planet, had called an enshrinement to “a legacy of treason and blood” — not much happened along Monument Avenue. A massive depression, “the Panic of 1893,” led the city to put its landscaping and infrastructure work on hold. By 1898, Confederate veterans from the soldiers home on Boulevard were volunteering to trim the grass of “Lee Circle.”
Leafy medians were at last planted in 1900, and city utilities were connected a year later. Yet when novelist Henry James visited in 1903, he viewed the intersection as “a mere vague centre of two or three crossways, without form and void, with a circle half sketched by three or four groups of small, new, mean houses.” The statue of Lee was “some precious pearl of ocean, washed up on a rude, bare strand.”
By 1904, more than 200 scarlet and sugar maples were planted. The Lee statue attracted 14 new houses by 1905, and five years later, 53 stately residences lined Monument Avenue. Both the Jefferson Davis and J.E.B. Stuart statues were unveiled in 1907, and between them during the next decade, some 109 architect-designed houses went up. The laying of Belgian paving blocks got underway between 1908 and 1910.
Two theories might explain the circumstances surrounding this picture, taken under a featureless gray sky.
The first is that the tobacco was an extension of the Virginia Agricultural, Mechanical and Tobacco Exposition, located on North Boulevard approximately where The Diamond is today. Streetcars running from Boulevard to Broad could’ve brought visitors to an off-site exhibition. The name of the exposition, a predecessor of the State Fair of Virginia, emphasized that while tobacco was farming, for early 20th-century Richmond, it was also big business.
The second theory posits the field as a World War I-inspired “victory garden” growing the crop for the troops awaiting return from overseas.
At left in the picture, behind the tree, is the Shenandoah Apartments, bankrolled by Pin Money Pickles creator Ellen G. Kidd and her husband. The Kidds hired one of the region’s best architects, Berlin-born and educated Carl Ruehrmund, to create the structure, built between 1904 and 1906.
The city directory indicates the Shenandoah of 1919 had about 40 residents, not counting all household members. After numerous transformations, including 1970s-era restaurant Gracie-allen’s on the first floor, the Shenandoah today is a Greenfield Senior Living facility.
To the left of the Shenandoah in the picture, two chimneys poke above the trees; that’s probably 1800 W. Grace St., at the corner of Allen Avenue, designed in 1907 by D. Wiley Anderson for dry-goods king Junius Mosby. Mosby’s flagship building, 201-205 W. Broad St., is today’s Quirk Hotel.
To the right of the monument is a jumble of buildings. The taller, distant structure appears to be 900 N. Lombardy St., the present U-Haul Moving & Storage building. The site originally served as warehouses for the R.A. Patterson Tobacco Co., which introduced the Lucky Strike brand. The company founded by Richard Archibald Patterson, a Confederate veteran and former physician, became a subsidiary of the British American Tobacco Co., which in 1915 expanded the Patterson buildings as they produced “Kool” cigarettes. Patterson Avenue is named for the tobacco entrepreneur, and Malvern Avenue carries his son’s name.
The assortment of buildings below the warehouse appears to be the rear of houses and outbuildings along West Grace Street. No. 1647 was the home of widow Bessie G. Bowers, whose husband, Charles, was struck and killed Dec. 3, 1903, during an engine test while employed at Richmond Locomotive Works.
At 1649 lived the family of George W. Hunter, secretary-treasurer-manager of the Cardwell Machine Co. at 1900 E. Cary St., today the Canal Walk Lofts. A son, George Jr., was in the United States Navy, and a daughter, Elsie, lived there, too.
The Romanesque Revival townhouse with Colonial Revival details in plain view at right is No. 1632, where Mary L. Bray, another widow, lived. Barely visible is the house at 1628, belonging to the family of Roland D. Harlow, who managed a local feed company.
What of the tobacco field? It occupies the same pie-shaped lot where today stands the former Lee Medical Building, constructed by Franklin A. Trice during 1951 and 1952 as a complement to nearby Stuart Circle and Retreat hospitals. Today, it’s slated for conversion to apartments, a plan that has generated vigorous displeasure from some residents — mirroring the reaction when the idea for the building first went public.
“The proposal for the office building was met with civic outrage over the proposed size and function,” the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported in an April 6, 1950, article about a zoning board meeting. One speaker argued that, “in our cities today, we have very little beauty. Richmond and Virginia do have Gen. Lee. Please let him stand serene and beautiful there as he has for so many years.”
Trice sought to install a pharmacy and soda fountain on the building’s first floor, but the suggestion further inflamed opponents, who were quoted in a May 8, 1952, Times-Dispatch article as saying that such enterprises are an open invitation to “teenagers and bobby-soxers” who “would be hanging out up and down the street — some on roller skates — creating racket and scattering trash until homeowners would be ruined.”
Trice got his building, but the city refused him a business license for a pharmacy or a soda fountain that might attract hooligan bobby-soxers and their rock ’n’ roll.
