Yet another photo from William Picket of yet another 1980’s Overlook mishap…
Category Archives: history
1980’s mishap at the Overlook…
Bought & Moved
A old photo (courtesy of William Pickett) of James Bradford, Joe Seipel, and Addison with the old house they bought.
The Jacob House, built in 1817 with labor by freed black men for a Quaker owner. An historic icon displaced from its original location by VCU. Thankfully, these folks saved it from destruction. Currently owned and well maintained by the Oregon Hill Home Improvement Council. The current tenant is civil engineer George Nyfeller and his company.
School Kids
St. Andrew’s School’s FaceBook page featured this great photo:
Talk about #TBT! This photo of St. Andrew’s students playing in the yard is likely from right around 1900. They would have all lived close by in the Oregon Hill neighborhood and attended St. Andrew’s Church.
Alexander W. Weddell
Besides being the birth date of President Thomas Jefferson (1743), April 13th is also the birth date for diplomat Alexander W. Weddell (1876), who is buried in Hollywood Cemetery.
Hollywood Cemetery has a short bio on it’s website. Here’s a excerpt:
By 1923 the forty-seven-year-old, tall, courtly Virginian was convinced that he would probably remain a bachelor for the rest of his life. In February of that year, however, a meeting for afternoon tea in a fashionable Calcutta hotel with some old Virginia friends and a vivacious widow from St. Louis quickly led to courtship. Weddell arranged to take his leave and met Mrs. Steedman’s party in Rangoon, Burma. The romance continued on the trip back to the United States, and the couple married in St. Ambrose Chapel at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City four months after first meeting.
The couple returned to Calcutta late in 1923 where they remained until Weddell was transferred to Mexico City in 1924. Upon arrival in Mexico, the couple found a nation that was torn by revolution. Years of US intervention into Latin American affairs and resentment caused by the vast profits American corporations syphoned from their extensive Mexican holdings were fueling a strong “anti-Yankee” sentiment. Americans demanded restitution for the deaths of several US citizens during Poncho Villa’s border raids into Arizona and New Mexico. Weddell, who initially sympathized with Mexican interests, found coping with corruption and bureaucracy extremely vexing and discouraging.
In 1928, deeply concerned about his wife’s health, yearning to return to Virginia, and disappointed in his assignment by the Republican administration to Montreal, Weddell, a southern Democrat, resigned from the diplomatic corps. Weddell’s retirement came to an end, however, in 1933 when he finally achieved his dream of becoming an ambassador, being assigned by Franklin D. Roosevelt to the mission to Argentina. He and his wife spent “five interesting and happy years in that wonderful country,” after which Roosevelt offered Weddell the very difficult post of ambassador to Fransisco Franco’s Spain in 1939. By 1942, advancing age, health problems, and the cumulative frustration of working with an unresponsive State Department and observing Nazi influence in the Madrid government convinced Ambassador Weddell to retire permanently from foreign service.
By 1943 the couple had returned to Richmond where he was elected president of the Virginia Historical Society, and she resumed her gardening and continued her charity work.
326 S. Pine Street
A house that has since been demolished, 326 S. Pine St., was at the location of the Pine St. Baptist Church parking lot on the 300 block of Pine Street. In the first photo, it’s the sliver of a house that is just to the left of the corner pharmacy storefront, which is now Pine Street Barbershop. The overall photo is a panoramic photo of Oregon Hill residents in front of Pine Street Baptist Church, that is currently hung in the William Byrd Community House. As it turns out, the late Senator Benedetti on March 28, 1929 was born at 326 S. Pine St. His father, Carl Vincent Benedetti appears in the city directories at that address from 1926 to 1933. The Senator died last November.
VCU Shares Photo Collection On Flickr
An excerpt from today’s press release:
RICHMOND, Va. (March 25, 2015) — VCU Libraries has been named as the 100th institution to take part in Flickr’s The Commons, an online project that seeks to share hidden treasures from the world’s public photography archives.
As part of The Commons, VCU Libraries’ digital special and archival image collections that have no known copyright restrictions will be discoverable through the photo-sharing website Flickr, as well as through search tools that pull public domain images without known copyright restrictions for use and reuse.
“It’s significant,” said Lauren Work, digital collections librarian. “VCU Libraries will be joining an international group of institutions with the goal to increase public access to image collections that have no known copyright restrictions, which connects directly to our educational mission.”
Joining The Commons will greatly increase the discoverability and potential use of VCU Libraries’ image collections. It will also allow the public to share their knowledge of the images, potentially enriching the collections with comments and tags.
Irish History
RVAnews.com has an article on the history of Irish immigrants in Richmond.
Excerpt:
Most Irish men in the 1830s worked to construct the Kanawha Canal, which had been conceived a half-century earlier by George Washington as a means of transporting people and freight from Richmond to the coast. This would have been incomprehensibly grueling labor. The Irish worked alongside slaves to dig deep channels through the hard red clay, knee-deep in mud and at the mercy of the mosquitoes that would have thrived in the stagnant filth. Yellow fever, malaria, and cholera were rampant. After a particularly hot summer in 1838 during which several workers died of exhaustion, about 200 Irish immigrants fled Richmond to seek safer work in the North.
Little Ramp
Harvey Hardware
Before SweetFrog on W. Cary Street, there was Harvey Hardware. This 1986 photo comes courtesy of William Pickett, who made the sign.