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2 Restless Richmond In 1900 a Richmond journalist lamented the loss of the city’s minor league baseball team and traced the cause to falling attendance during the previous three years. “The fact is,” he explained, “that people are too busy to lose one or two afternoons a week, even to devote themselves to the exhilaration that comes with a good game of ball.” “There is,” he added, “too much business going on to allow time to go to a ball game.” In 1913 an editorial writer rendered another assessment of the city: “All in all, Richmond is in the exact condition of an old town suddenly growing very vast. Many things demand improvement.” Taken together the two commentaries revealed the direction of early-twentieth-century Richmond. The community achieved three decades of steady economic growth and counted a population in 1930 that was more than double the number tallied in 1900. With this success came problems energetic reformers tried to remedy. Though not always agreeing about solutions, these Richmond progressives did fan a progressive breeze that reshaped a city better known for its history.1 In the early twentieth century, a visitor to Richmond could have easily concluded that the city was still preoccupied with its past. Richmond surrounded guests with vestiges of bygone days. Located at the falls of the James River, the city’s hilly terrain perpetuated clusters of compact neighborhoods where old houses and public buildings became sources of local pride. The Masonic Hall dated to 1785. Based on designs submitted by Thomas Jefferson, the state capitol had been completed in 1796. In the twentieth century, preservationists protected the home of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, probably antebellum Richmond’s most esteemed resident. Believed to be one of the city’s oldest buildings, “the Old Stone House” was converted into a museum for Edgar Allan Poe, who had grown up in Richmond. From the capitol grounds, with its statues of George Washington and Henry Clay, visitors could travel to the city’s younger West End, where Monument Avenue and Hollywood Cemetery provided striking reminders of the Confederacy. To visit Richmond was to enter a landscape laden with heroic images of the past.2 Yet Richmond reckoned with a more complex history that revolved around its role as a center of trade, government, and industry. In the 1640s English colonists built a fort near the falls of the James River. In the 1670s William Byrd I established a trading post, and William Byrd II created the town of Richmond, incorporated in 1742. During the American Revolution, a prudent Virginia assembly shifted the state capital to Richmond from the more militarily vulnerable Williamsburg. Functioning both as a seat of government and as a military storehouse, Richmond thrived.3 After the Revolution, Richmond began a process of erratic but substantial economic growth. By the 1830s transportation improvements placed Richmond in a position of regional commercial dominance. Arriving shipments of tobacco, iron ore, and wheat fueled Richmond’s growing industries. With ¤fty cigar and tobacco factories in 1860, Richmond manufactured more tobacco than any other city in the world. The most prominent of the city’s seven ®our mills, the Gallego mill was the second largest in the world. Tredegar Iron and Belle Isle formed the foundation for the city’s iron industry and contributed to a diversi¤ed manufacturing sector. German and Irish immigrants, as well as free people of color, comprised a signi¤cant portion of the population, as did slaves, who provided an important source of skilled and unskilled labor. Richmond ’s educational institutions included more than a score of private schools, Richmond College, the Medical College of Virginia, and the Richmond Female Institute. In 1860 four newspapers were published in the city, as was the Southern Literary Messenger.4 The Civil War earned Richmond a permanent place in American history but did so at the cost of chaos, carnage, and economic catastrophe. As the Confederate capital, Richmond saw its population swollen with strangers— rowdy regiments from the Deep South, refugees from Union-controlled territory , Confederate of¤cials and civil servants, Union prisoners, wounded soldiers , prostitutes, gamblers, and criminals. Overwhelmed municipal of¤cials struggled to provide adequate city services. Shortages of food, housing, and medical supplies plagued the community, leading to privation for many and in®ation for all. Doctors ministered to suffering at the ¤fty city hospitals, and battles produced avalanches of corpses. The climactic tragedy occurred 3 April 1865, when retreating Confederate...

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