The Pump House (Photo by Jay Paul)
At the Byrd Park Pump House this month, you can join a themed bicycle ride, tour the building and grounds, and commune with Edgar Allan Poe. The events are sponsored by the stewards of the city-owned property, the nonprofit Friends of Pump House. Since 2017 they’ve voluntarily devoted themselves to keeping the place intact and regularly hosting events to keep the Pump House in the public mind. Their Centennial Celebration this fall marks not the building’s 1883 completion, but the 1924 cessation of its use as the city’s waterworks.
The group is also recognizing recent successes in procuring funding for major steps toward the Pump House joining the James River Park System as a center for education and recreation. It’s the beginning of a process — entailing everything from lavatories to wheelchair accessibility — that will allow full public access to the building for the first time in a century.
“There’s no point to asking for a couple million to fix up a room if the roof is leaking,” observes Penn Markham, president of Friends of Pump House. “I think things will snowball once we can get that done.” The leaking slate roof covers approximately 17,000 square feet of chambers and space. Given how long the Pump House has gone without constant maintenance, he adds, it’s in far better shape than one might think.
The building has approximately 103 windows — depending on how you count them, Markham emphasizes. “They’re all in rough shape,” Markham says. In the first round of rehabilitation, the 13 windows in the worst condition received care from Karnage Construction, a local firm. The next 30 will be remade at Museum Resources Construction and Millwork in Providence Forge.
The onetime office and map room at the Pump House (Photo by Jay Paul)
Markham is especially eager to see the eventual restoration of the stained-glass windows. Despite a lack of photographic evidence, surviving examples of broken glass allow the styles and colors to be determined, he explains. The pieces were set in a lattice frame, an installation technique requiring special knowledge to replicate.
All these aesthetic touches came from Wilfred Emory Cutshaw (1837-1907), who for 34 years served as Richmond’s city engineer. He oversaw the creation of many of the city’s parks and managed the construction of numerous public buildings, including the Pump House and what is now Old City Hall.
Cutshaw placed the waterworks, which pumped water from the James River to the city’s main water supply at the Byrd Park Reservoir, in the middle of a 160-acre park complete with paths, a waterfall and benches. He accentuated it with an open-air entrance, vaulted ceilings and a second-floor pavilion for social functions.
The second-floor pavilion at the Pump House, where social events took place in its heyday (Photo by Jay Paul)
His inspiration for the design isn’t known. Cutshaw traveled to Europe and may have admired the remnants of medieval fortresses built by barons to control commercial and public access to rivers. The Pump House is situated near the James River and Kanawha Canal’s Three Mile Locks and lock keeper’s house, as well as the canal’s monumental “Lower Arch,” once visited by George Washington. Cutshaw would have known all this and perhaps sought to mark the spot, even though railroads had supplanted canals by the time the Pump House was constructed.
However, the canals remained for leisure activities. Prior to World War I, revelers could board a canal boat for a 5-mile-an-hour voyage to the Pump House to attend social dances. The musicians, without a stage or amplification, played in the middle of the room as the festivities and shadows whirled around them.
Boaters near the Pump House in the early 20th century; the second-floor pavilion was for a time enclosed by stained-glass windows. (Photo courtesy Rosalind Urbach)
The parties at the Pump House ended shortly after it was closed a century ago. The machinery was sold and a more modern facility built next door. By 1950, the city considered demolishing Cutshaw’s castle but instead sold it for a dollar to First Presbyterian Church, whose leaders decided they didn’t want it after all.
In 1969 the Richmond Department of Recreation and Parks hired Williamsburg-based landscape architect Stanley Abbott and his architect son Carlton to devise a plan for the river and canals. The senior Abbott presented a blue-sky vision that, among other things, called for the transformation of the disused Pump House into a centerpiece for the Three Mile Lock, offering history and dinner theater.
Eventually, along came James Moore III, William Trout III, James River Parks administrator Ralph White and a band of volunteers. Moore and Trout led a struggle to rescue the Lower Arch from trees and vines. For the 1983 Pump House celebration, the canal folks brought small boats into the waterway, in part to prove it was still possible.
Chris Knoop of Friends of Pump House leads a tour of the structure. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Variations of the Abbott proposal endured. In their 1997 “Falls of the James Atlas,” a detailed map and history book, Trout, Moore and George D. Rawls describe the Pump House as a “treasure well worth saving.” Their plan suggested shuttle boat rides from downtown to the Pump House, which would house Virginia canal archives and a boat display, a concert and meeting venue, and a restaurant.
The Friends of Pump House, in their August 2024 vision plan, also propose a commemoration of the canal story, plus a component for science and industrial education. They envision the Pump House serving as a welcome center for the north bank of the James River Parks, with the option to “perhaps even rent out canoes/kayaks/stand-up paddleboards for use in the canal.” The second-floor pavilion could become a unique venue for weddings, reunions and banquets. Already in its less-than-renovated state, it has hosted concerts of dance and music.
Wilfred Cutshaw, it seems, was on to something.
The Pump House Centennial Celebration includes building tours on Saturday, Oct. 19, a bike tour on Sunday, Oct. 20, and a Poe @ the Pump House event on Saturday, Oct. 26.
Never miss a Sunday Story: Sign up for the newsletter, and we’ll drop a fresh read into your inbox at the start of each week. To keep up with the latest posts, search for the hashtag #SundayStory on Facebook and Instagram.
