Reconstruction
During 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery. Richmond Reconstruction began. Richmond’s Theological School for Freedmen, later becoming Virginia Union University, was established that year. In 1866, the first organized Memorial Day was celebrated in Richmond at Oakwood Cemetery near Church Hill on the Nine Mile Road. Many fallen Confederate troops were buried there and at Hollywood Cemetery, just west of the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond.
In 1869, the segregated public school system was started in the city. Black voters registered in the city’s first municipal election since the end of the Civil War. One year later, Virginia was readmitted to the Union with a new Constitution and Federal troops were removed from the city. 1870 has been called the Year of Disasters. The worst flood in 100 years occurred. An overcrowding during a court hearing over Richmond’s elections collapsed the third floor of the Virginia State Capitol, causing it to fall into the Hall of the House of Delegates, killing 60 and injuring 250. Robert E. Lee’s death in Lexington where he headed what is now Washington and Lee University compounded grief, followed by the Spotswood Hotel fire, killing eight people.
Over the next decade, the city’s first high school, Richmond High School, opened in 1873. Cigarette manufacturing was introduced in Richmond by P.H. Mayo & Bros. Tobacco Co. in 1874, further expanding the city’s economic importance to the tobacco industry. The last Federal troops were removed from the South in 1877, and Reconstruction ended. Virginia politics underwent many power struggles in the 1870s and 1880s. Conservatives split over repayment of the state’s pre-war debt. “Funders” wanted the full amount to be paid, much of which was held by northern interests. “Readjusters” wanted a portion to be paid by the new State of West Virginia, and formed the Readjuster Party, a coalition of Republicans, conservative Democrats, and free blacks led by railroad executive William Mahone. Mahone was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he served from 1881 to 1887, and the Readjuster’s candidate, William E. Cameron, was elected as Virginia’s governor, serving from 1882 to 1886. However, by 1883, Democrats were assuming power in state politics, which they held about 80 years, until the fall of the Byrd Organization in the late 1960s, following the death of former Governor and U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd in 1966.
Richmond’s population had reached 60,600 by 1880, and the James River and Kanawha Canal closed with tracks of the Richmond and Allegheny Railroad of Major James H. Dooley laid on its towpath. In 1885, the Robert E. Lee Camp Soldiers Home for Confederate Veterans opened.
Monument Avenue was laid out in 1907, with a series of monuments at various intersections honoring the city’s Confederate heroes. Included were J.E.B. Stuart, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Matthew F. Maury.
Richmond had the first successful electrically powered trolley system in the United States. Designed by electric power pioneer, Frank J. Sprague, the trolley system opened its first line in January, 1888. Richmond’s hills, long a transportation obstacle, were considered an ideal proving ground. The new technology soon replaced horsecars.
As part of a national trend, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the electrically powered street railway systems accelerated Richmond’s expansion. To generate traffic and fuel sales of property, amusement parks were created at the end of the lines at Lakeside Park, Westhampton Park, and Forest Hill Park. Rails of interurban streetcar services formed a suburban network from Richmond extending north to Ashland and south to Chester, Colonial Heights, Petersburg and Hopewell. Another interurban route ran east along the Nine Mile Road and terminated at the National Cemetery at Seven Pines at the end of the Nine Mile Road, where many Union Civil War dead were interred. Electrically powered trolleybuses, also using the Sprague technology, later operated in local service in nearby Petersburg for several years.
In 1894, a new City Hall was built in Victorian Gothic style. The building, now called the “Old City Hall”, is located just north of Capitol Square near the statue of Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire. It is across the Broad Street from current Richmond City Hall, built in 1971.
In 1896, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that, “separate but equal” laws did not deprive blacks of civil rights guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Confederate Museum opened and the National Confederate Reunion (the first of five) was held in Richmond. One year later the Richmond Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy was established.