Featured Stories
Maggie L. Walker: Richmond History Maker
Maggie L. Walker – a mother, a leader, a civil rights activist, an entrepreneur, a Richmonder.
Valentine’s Meat Juice
The love story of Mann and Ann Valentine is full of romance, money and meat.
Dr. James McClurg: Richmond History Maker
Doctor James McClurg, Elizabeth Wickham's father, left the Constitutional Convention without signing the final document.
Belle Isle Prison
Conditions in the Belle Isle Prison camp killed almost one thousand Union soldiers during the Civil War.
Edgar Allan Poe: Richmond History Maker
Edgar Allan Poe was no stranger to loneliness, financial trouble and depression. He even invented a new literary genre that aimed to inspire dread in its simplest, shortest and purest form.
Fan Free Clinic
The first free clinic in Virginia, two doctors, a nurse and a minister founded Fan Free Clinic in 1970.
First African Baptist
In the antebellum era, the Baptist church was popular in southern African American communities in part because it conferred more rights to Black members than other denominations. Often, Baptist churches offered free and enslaved Blacks full membership, and sometimes even administrative roles. This may be difficult to imagine now, but many Baptists churches at that time were not only integrated, but claimed many more Black members than white. In Richmond, this was indeed the case.
Lillian Payne and the Independent Order of St. Luke
“Who is so helpless as the negro woman? Who is so circumscribed and hemmed in—in the race of life, in the struggle for bread, meat, and clothing—as the negro woman?”
Richmond City Jail
Richmond City Jail troubled from the beginning in Shockoe Bottom.