Presented by Veronica Jemmott (Virginia LISC) on Saturday May 15, 2010 at The 6th Annual Susan Carter Williams Memorial Seminar, presented by the Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods, on Historic Fulton: Past, Present, and Future.

Recorded by John Murden.

Presented by Selden Richardson on Saturday May 15, 2010 at The 6th Annual Susan Carter Williams Memorial Seminar, presented by the Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods, on Historic Fulton: Past, Present, and Future.

Recorded by John Murden.

As excavators claw at the earth in Richmond’s Fulton neighborhood, a sign announces “another revitalization project of RRHA.”

Four decades after it demolished and displaced virtually an entire community, the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority’s body of work in Fulton more resembles an interment than a revitalization. So those who remember Fulton before urban renewal aren’t turning cartwheels over the clearing of land for 26 new single-family homes — the second phase of a project that will add 58 homes to Fulton but further distance this historic neighborhood from its past.

Richmond has a disturbing legacy of cleaving old neighborhoods (see Jackson Ward) or making them vanish without a trace. That was the case when the Richmond Coliseum and the Virginia BioTechnology Research Park swallowed Navy Hill. If something isn’t done, old Fulton could be purged from memory.

“This is part and parcel of what’s been going on here for 40 years,” said Spencer Jones, 59, who was born in the same Denny Street home as his mom and is the keeper of the fading Fulton flame.

Jones and other old Fultonites have found an ally in David Herring, director of the Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods.

“I cannot even imagine having your entire community wiped off the planet and having no recourse,” Herring said. He likened former Fulton residents to ghosts seeking to reconcile their prior existence. “Your entire connection to the universe was wiped off the planet and you don’t know what to do.”

To salvage memories of the community and preserve a longtime gathering place, the Fulton Family Reunion Committee has made a modest request — that the now-vacant 4800 and 4900 blocks of Fulton Street be preserved for the Fulton Memorial Park.

When asked about the park proposal, RRHA spokeswoman Felicia McLemore said in an email: “We cannot accommodate the request for that question at this time.”

What’s clear is Fultonites have been kicked off the proposed park site, which lies within the construction zone. The area is a meeting place for Fulton alumni and the location of an annual summer reunion. Having pulverized the physical Fulton, forces are at work to sever its spiritual and emotional bonds.

“They can say it all pretty and fancy, but the bottom line is they’re trying to break our will,” Jones said.

The development would surround the oldest home in Fulton, a 1965 brick rancher owned by Earl Robinson.

“I knew one day it was coming,” said Robinson, 67. “Now it’s here.”

It’s a sad denouement for a community that dates to May 1607, when English explorers from Jamestown were greeted by American Indians, an alliance report says.

The lower portion of Fulton, known as Rocketts, was annexed into the city in 1867. It became a densely developed neighborhood with cobblestone streets, brick row houses, churches and businesses before drugs and decay led RRHA to raze and rebuild it rather than reclaim it.

Fulton’s population fell from 3,062 in 1970 to 123 a decade later. Today, it has about half of its 1970 population but is otherwise unrecognizable since its renewal.

“It is a suburban subdivision in every respect. It’s totally out of context,” Herring said. “Once you get past Gillies Creek, you could be in Henrico County.”

Herring is trying to make people understand what’s at stake. “Maybe people should put the brakes on and heal the wounds of the urban-renewal effort 40 years ago.”

Given its role in the near-death of a historic Richmond neighborhood, a memorial park is the least the RRHA can do.
 

I read Selden Richardson’s Built by Blacks in late 2006. This sent me off to find out if his descriptions of Evergreen Cemetery were accurate, to see it for myself: Evergreen is everything that he described and more. This medieval cemetery was my takeaway, but another recent read has sent me back to Richardson’s amazing book and the chapter on the urban renewal that has all but erased the original Fulton from the map of Richmond.

My first exposure to the tale of the demolition of Fulton didn’t really stick. At the time it was more difficult for me to imagine that the city and federal governments, through neglect and demolition, would conspire to take apart an entire community. The lack of almost all visual references hides that the area has any history at all, and the story of old Fulton didn’t really sink in.

A recent tip led me to pick up Scott Davis’ The World of Patience Gromes: Making and Unmaking a Black Community (1988), and this book and it’s people made that Fulton real to me. I was surprised to find in a recent re-read of Richardson’s book that he references Patience Gromes repeatedly; I don’t know how I didn’t follow this up at the time. After reading Patience Gromes, I really wanted to be able to see this Fulton that was being described.

Richmond Then and Now’s archive of Times-Dispatch articles about Fulton show some of the story of the demolition of Fulton, but don’t really show the community before.

A 1935 print by Charles W. Smith, Fulton from Church Hill, tantilizingly shows a dense urban neighborhood, on a regular street grid, with rows of houses and a large central church.

With limited resources available online, I paid a visit to the Valentine Richmond History Center for a look in their archives. I was hoping to find photos of Fulton that would let me see it in the context of Richmond’s neighborhoods that still survive, to maybe see in Union Hill, Oregon Hill or the Fan echoes of the streets of Fulton that are so different now. I found a few resources at the Valentine, and was able to get a few scanned to share out.

All of the images below credited to “Valentine” are from the Cook Collection, Valentine Richmond History Center. All rights to the images are reserved by Valentine Richmond History Center. The photos are arranged oldest to newest as best I can tell. Click to view a larger version if available.

The amazing aerial photo puts authentic detail to the church and row houses of Smith’s 1935 print. The baseball game underway in the center and the horse & carriage in the bottom left corner hint at the life in the community. Looking at the larger version, I feel like if I look long enough, more people will start moving across the photo. Of the images of Fulton that I’ve found, it is one of the few (see also) from before the urban renewal period — almost every other photo was taken later to illustrate decrepitness and decay.

This 1961 photo of the corner of Erin and Nicholson is from a later Richmond Times-Dispatch article. It was used to illustrate “the dilapidated homes” in the area.

These boarded-up Fulton Street storefronts are immediately reminiscent of Main Street in Shockoe Bottom or Hull Street in Manchester.

This could be Venable Street between 21st and Mosby today.

Government Road crosses left-to-right across the top of the photo, the train tracks are at the far right. The former trolley barn, still existent, can be seen just off center at the top.

The 2nd of the two aerial photos above shows the houses just about right up on the James River. Some of this part of the street grid is the same, though the bulk of the neighborhood (and Gillies Creek) has been redrawn as you can see in the 2 maps below.