Whitmell S. Forbes originally wanted his mansion at 3401 Monument Ave. to face east down the street. The city dissuaded him due to envisioned westward expansion. The home was completed in 1914. (Photo courtesy Cook Collection, The Valentine)
Whitmell Stallings Forbes collected businesses like charms on a bracelet.
His interests included the fertilizer firm Richmond Guano Co., part ownership of the Richmond and Henrico Railway Co., And directorship on the board of the Virginia Trust Co. He served as vice president of the Atlantic Varnish Works and as an executive with the Virginia Baking Co. and the E.M. Todd meatpacking concern, which for several years operated as the W.S. Forbes Co.
In 1914, Forbes commissioned an unrecorded architect to design a residence at 3401 Monument Ave. near the intersection of Roseneath Road. The 24-room mansion exhibited a grandiose interpretation of Colonial Revival in yellow brick and a tile roof. The design burst with terraces, balconies, side porches featuring Ionic columns, swags and garlands. Four monumental Corinthian columns supported the 40-foot-high entrance portico. A later critic described the place as representing “the apotheosis extremus of the Monument Avenue house as conspicuous display.”
The bounds of the 37-acre Forbes estate went along Roseneath Road, Park Avenue, and Hamilton and Broad streets. Features of the landscaped grounds included a garage and stables tucked back near the Belt Line railroad cut and a small farm with a caretaker’s abode. Forbes further created a neighborhood surrounding the property.
He came into the world on Dec. 23, 1851, as the only child to his Currituck, North Carolina, farming parents, William P. and Jane Stallings. His father died the next year. Young Forbes received education at Wake Forest University and the Charlotte Academy. He left schooling at age 15 to embark on the working life, first as a clerk in various mercantile firms and then as the founder of a business that he ran for eight years. On Oct. 11, 1876, he married Bostonian Annie Blanchard.
The Forbeses moved here in 1880. Within four years, Sylvanus Blanchard, Forbes’ father-in-law who had by then located to Richmond, built 806 W. Franklin, an impressive Second Empire mansion, for the growing family: Edna Louise (1877), Blanchard Stallings (1879), Annabel (1884), William Perkins (1886), Raleigh Christian (1887) and another son, who died in infancy (1889). The house today provides offices for Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Psychology.
Forbes retained commercial interests in his home state as the principal owner of the Henrietta Cotton Mills and in 1895 established the Edna Cotton Mills in Reidsville, North Carolina. In Richmond, he added on the provisions and fertilizer businesses.
Richmond business magnate Whitmell S. Forbes, seen in a 1913 photograph by Walter Washington Foster, died in 1930. (Photo courtesy Virginia Museum of History & Culture)
By 1888, he’d built a summer house near Bon Air that he dubbed Monte Bello. He sold the place in 1912 to Robert Kyrk. Three years later, a fire destroyed the home. The spectacular conflagration could be seen by observers in Byrd Park.
On April 28, 1907, tragedy crossed the threshold of the Forbes household. Raleigh, 20, a recent graduate of St. Paul’s School in New York, engaged to be married and working for his father, “a man of much promise,” the Richmond Times-Dispatch described, fell ill and died at 806 W. Franklin.
The grieving Forbeses in 1919 established the Raleigh Forbes Memorial Baptist Church on Fulton Hill. “The structure … is finished on the interior in cherry and mahogany,” the Times-Dispatch reported on the church’s May 11 official dedication. It merged with Montrose Baptist Church on July 12, 1987, to become Carlisle Avenue Baptist Church.
By 1913, the Forbes family had begun to reside at 921 W. Franklin, an imposing, domed-turreted Richardson Romanesque brownstone that today is known as the Kearney House, where the offices of VCU’s Center for Public Policy are located. Forbes’ wife Annie died there on Dec. 14, 1913, age 58, of apoplexy caused by arterial sclerosis. His 1920 donation of some $750,000 (now $13.1 million) in her memory allowed the First Baptist Church to move from North 12th and East Broad streets to North Mulberry Street and Monument Avenue.
The other Forbes children eventually took on careers and families of their own. Edna married Arthur P. Ripley, the British-born president of the Atlantic Varnish Works. Blanchard worked in the family businesses and served a year in World War I as a lieutenant. Annabel first married warehousing executive Elmore D. Hotchkiss Jr., followed by New Jersey real estate businessman Howard Cole. William went first into auto sales and then real estate; in 1914, he married Daisy Florence Boykin.
Meanwhile, plans proceeded for the construction of the Forbes dream house on Monument, which was completed in 1914.
When the street was extended, the city paid Forbes $45,000 ($1.2 million today) for the two acres necessary for the right of way. The amount also covered the lowering below grade of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad (The Belt Line). Most of the other landowners donated their land.
In December 1918, the mansion’s garage erupted into flames.
“The underground gasoline tank almost blew us all to kingdom come,” Forbes chauffeur Sam Richardson remembered.
The pre-dawn fire caused by an overheated stove leveled Forbes’ Garage Mahal and damaged some 15 cars.
The Times-Dispatch reported how firefighters and policemen at great risk led away four horses, a pony and a mule. With the last blindfolded animal out of danger, the roof collapsed.
The uninsured loss totaled some $17,000, about $400,000 today.
More tragedy visited Forbes when daughter Annabel, the mother of two sons and living at the mansion apart from her second husband, succumbed in 1923 to a chronic kidney condition at age 33.
On Aug. 5, 1930, Forbes went to bed, “in his usual health,” a newspaper account described. He rose at 7 a.m. but collapsed in a paralytic seizure brought on by a cerebral hemorrhage. In death at 79 years old, he joined his wife, sons and daughter at Hollywood Cemetery.
Forbes died intestate. The $73,500 left by him ($1.3 million today, the bulk in real estate) received probate in Chancery Court with sons Blanchard (a Sebrof Investment vice president) and William (Sebrof’s president) qualifying as administrators.
Blanchard later left his executive position and for a few years worked in the offices of the commissioner of revenue. In 1938, he became the bailiff for the Civil Justice Court, Part II, though he left the faded splendor of Forbes mansion for 2022 Stuart Ave.
Around this time, the big house, without anyone who either could afford or wanted to keep the place, got taken apart, giant Corinthian columns and all.
The city rounded off the corners at Roseneath and widened the intersection in anticipation of another monument.
The empty land soon attracted an out-of-town developer, who sought to put up a two-block, 220-unit apartment building. Rezoning for the construction received strident rejections in 1938 from 100 residents. “Monument Avenue is a high-class residential street,” Guy B. Hazelgrove declared. “It was so planned, and it should remain as planned.”
The rezoning petition received a thumbs-down, and the property went instead into subdivision for single houses. To this day, city assessment records refer to the acreages upon which these places stand as “The Forbes Tract.”
On July 10, 1996, following contentious debate, a monument honoring athlete and activist Arthur Ashe received dedication at Monument and Roseneath.
