The Romanesque Henrico County courthouse, built in 1896 at the corner of 22nd and Main Streets in Richmond, was listed for sale earlier this year.
Past the bustle of Shockoe Bottom, on the way to Tobacco Row, an imposing brick building featuring an arched portal and flagpole stands at 22nd and East Main streets. For those new to local history, and to many who aren’t, the building’s story may come as something of a surprise: Built in 1896, it is the old Henrico County courthouse, sheriff’s office and jail.
It’s a holdover from another time, when Richmond was a mere fledgling town in Henrico County. The original colonial courthouse was built in the middle of what is now 22nd Street in 1752, just a few years after Richmond was founded. It was here, on Aug. 5, 1776, that Henrico’s sheriff proclaimed the Declaration of Independence by order of Lt. Gov. John Page. Shortly after the General Assembly incorporated Richmond as a city in 1782, it was also here that the newly established governing body, the 12-member Common Council, elected Richmond’s first mayor, physician William Foushee.
The first courthouse was replaced in 1825 by a one-story brick building with a four-column Doric portico that echoed the Thomas Jefferson-designed statehouse on nearby Capitol Hill. When 22nd Street opened to traffic in 1843, the building was dismantled and rebuilt at the corner of 22nd and Main streets. At the end of the Civil War in 1865, the building was damaged when retreating Confederates set fire to warehouses along the riverfront.
After 1867, when Richmond annexed this section of Henrico, the courthouse stood in the city proper. This raised serious questions about the site: Could the county court legally sit there? If someone committed a crime in the courthouse or on the grounds, did county officers hold authority?
The General Assembly settled matters, declaring “the lot of land known as Henrico County courthouse property” part of Henrico’s Fairfield magisterial district, “with all the rights, privileges and immunities belonging thereto.”
Following considerable debate about historical value and expense, a new courthouse, built in 1896, served as the county “seat of justice” until 1974, when Henrico built a new, larger courthouse on Parham Road. Through municipal whimsy not untypical of the metro, this little piece of Henrico remained lodged in one of Richmond’s oldest parts until 1988, when the county formally relocated its administrative offices to a sprawling government complex that was built around the courthouse. This caught the attention of descendants of the property’s original owner, James Cocke. Ownership reverted back to the family in 1992.
As of this writing, the old courthouse, sheriff’s offices and jail building is once again on the market.
‘Romanesque Done on the Cheap’
Fortunately for the heirs, Henrico saved the best for last: The final iteration of the courthouse, featuring heavy stone, twin towers, arched windows and entryways, was designed by the prolific and versatile architect Carl August Ruehrmund.
In December 1895, Henrico’s supervisors approved a new courthouse for a meager $20,000 — roughly $800,000 in today’s dollars. They commissioned Ruehrmund, who immigrated to Richmond from Berlin in 1881 and apprenticed with fellow German-born architect Albert Lybrock; his designs include the cast-iron Gothic reliquary enclosing President James Monroe’s tomb in Hollywood Cemetery. Ruehrmund apparently inherited Lybrock’s business after his 1888 death.
You may not recognize Ruehrmund’s name, but his works are renowned in Richmond: the six-story Shenandoah Apartments at Allen and Grace streets, which housed The Martin Agency in the 1980s and is nearing conversion into a boutique hotel; the Mechanics and Savings Bank at North Third and East Clay streets, commissioned in 1909 by Richmond Planet publisher, editor and civil rights activist John Mitchell Jr.; and the Stumpf Hotel, now Stumpf Flats, at East Main and North Eighth streets, also built in 1909.
The courthouse’s first brick went in at 4:15 p.m. on May 21, 1896. Contractors William Trexler and Richard E. Elmore completed the project for its Nov. 9 opening.
For the online journal The Shockoe Examiner, historian Selden Richardson describes the two-towered building as “Richardsonian Romanesque done on the cheap,” because commissioners feared the cost overruns that plagued the exuberant Gothic Richmond City Hall, completed three years earlier on Broad Street. Historian Kim Chen reflects on the courthouse’s towering design, rising above two-story storefronts, in the Henrico County video “A Piece of Our Past.” “Its scale and grandeur were in sharp contrast to what was around it,” she said. “It really did make a statement.”
In 1939, a police officer peers through a hole in the Henrico County jail’s brickwork where eight inmates escaped using a series of knotted sheets.
Knotted Sheets
Henrico’s jail operated with less corruption and greater efficiency than Richmond’s notorious lockup down the hill on Marshall Street in Shockoe Bottom.
But desperate men are capable of almost anything, as historian Richardson writes. Before head count on Nov. 5, 1939, eight convicted car thieves and burglars climbed atop a steel jail tier, burrowed through brickwork above a first-floor window and lowered themselves down using knotted sheets. Three reached North Carolina before capture. A fourth, Walter Smith, 22, hopped a southbound freight train, reconsidered in North Carolina and returned by boxcar to Richmond, hoping to get home to Cincinnati.
Still in grimy blue jail clothes, Smith entered a Main Street cafe to warm himself, drink coffee and contemplate his options, within sight of the jail he’d squeezed out of. Police found him shivering beside the Chesapeake & Ohio tracks near Main Street Station, awaiting an empty coal car. Seven escapees returned to custody; the eighth apparently eluded authorities.
‘A Fascinating Place’
The jail remained in use until 1974, when Henrico began phasing out the complex at 22nd and Main for larger offices on Parham Road. Then James Cocke’s 18th-century proviso took effect. When the county seat moved from Varina in 1751, Cocke sold the property to Henrico with a stipulation: Should the courthouse move, “the said lot shall revert and be the property of James Cocke and his heirs forever.”
Descendant and lawyer Richard Cocke pointed out the clause to county administrators by lawsuit but agreed to delay action until the relocation was finished. In July 1988, Henrico Circuit Court ruled that the land and improvements should revert to the Cockes, including the 22,000-square-foot courthouse and 12,000-square-foot sheriff’s building.
On Nov. 10, 1992, the Cocke heirs put the property up for auction on the courthouse steps. Short Pump antiques dealer Kim Zimmerman arrived in a black Lexus and submitted the winning bid without seeing inside. “With everything going on down here, it could become a fascinating place,” he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
In March, Zimmerman told Richmond BizSense that owning such a building carries responsibility: “You’re really just a temporary steward of something that’s been here for generations.” What happens next at 22nd and Main, he mused, requires a different vision and investment.
Commonwealth Commercial now lists the complex for $4.9 million.
