VA -- Richmond -- Monumental Church:
- Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
- Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon
underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
- Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
- Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 3.17.150.89 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
- Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
|
[1] MENTAL_120606_03.JPG
|
[2]
 MENTAL_120606_06.JPG
|
[3] MENTAL_120606_15.JPG
|
[4] MENTAL_120606_21.JPG
|
[5] MENTAL_120606_28.JPG
|
- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- MENTAL_120606_06.JPG: Monumental Church:
The church is a memorial to the 72 people, including Virginia Governor George W. Smith, who died when the Richmond Theatre burned here in 1811. Several survivors owed their lives to the bravery of Gilbert Hunt, a slave blacksmith. A committee chaired by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall raised funds for the church's construction. Designed by Robert Mills and completed in 1814, the octagonal building served as an Episcopal church until 1965 and later as a chapel for the adjacent Medical College of Virginia.
- Wikipedia Description: Monumental Church
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Monumental Church is a former Episcopal Church that stands at 1224 E. Broad Street between N. 12th and College Streets in Richmond, Virginia. Designed by architect Robert Mills, it is one of America's earliest and most distinctive Greek Revival churches and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is a National Historic Landmark and is located in the Court End historic district.
Monumental Church was built between 1812 and 1814 to commemorate the 72 people who died on the site in the December 26, 1811 Richmond Theatre fire. The building consists of two parts: a crypt and a church. The crypt is located beneath the sanctuary and contains the remains of those claimed by the fire. The church is an octagonal construction of brick and Aquia sandstone with a stucco coat.
History
The site of Monumental Church was known initially as the first Academy of Fine Arts and Sciences in America, or "The Theatre Square." Chevalier Quesnay de Beaurepaire, a French officer in the Revolutionary army, had developed the idea for the academy but the plan was abandoned due to the war. In 1786 on this site Richmond's first theatre was built, which had the appearance of a "barn-like building." The Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788 was held in this building beginning on June 3 for three weeks "after first convening in the temporary capitol at Cary and fourteenth streets." Among the many individuals in attendance were James Madison, John Marshall, James Monroe, Edmund Pendleton, George Wythe, George Nicholas, Edmund Randolph, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry. This building was destroyed by fire in 1802 and the Richmond Theatre would replace it.
Following the 1811 theatre fire, the church was commissioned by Chief Justice John Marshall and designed by architect Robert Mills, the first American-born architect, the only pupil of Thomas Jefferson and the architect of the Washington Monument and White House of the Confederacy. Mills "had a reputation for being particularly concerned with fireproofing," probably owing to his work on Monumental, and later in his career designed Charleston's Fireproof Building as a testament to that fact.
Monumental Church established the first Sunday School program in Richmond on Nov. 20, 1817. Famous parishioners included Chief Justice John Marshall whose family occupied pew No. 23, Edgar Allan Poe, whose foster parents the Allans were members and occupied pew No. 80, the Marquis de Lafayette when he visited Richmond in 1824, William Mayo of Powhatan and the Chamberlayne family.
Three Richmond congregations were formed from Monumental, including: St. James's in 1831, St. Paul's in 1845 and All Saints in 1888.
Deconsecrated in 1965, it was given by the Medical College of Virginia to the Historic Richmond Foundation, an affiliate of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities.
Architecture
The design of the Monumental Church generated a certain amount of controversy between the two architects namely, Benjamin Henry Latrobe and Robert Mills who were consulted independently by the Committee. Latrobe who had submitted his designs initially had assumed that his plan was approved by the Committee. However, the Committee approved the plan submitted by Robert Mills which combined the monument with the church. This resulted in an awkward situation for Latrobe as Mills had worked as his assistant in his office. Latrobe refused to submit any alternate plan when requested by the Committee as he felt slighted. However, he commended their decision and wrote glowingly of the Mills capability to fulfill the assignment.
Following this, there was a sequence of exchange of letters between Latrobe and Mills though not very cordial at times, with the Latrobe’s last letter of July 22, 1812 addressed to Mills ending the controversy. Mills is said to have replied stating that he was not aware of Latrobe’s plans and designs. However, the final design of Mills was adopted for the Monument Church.
Mill's plan consisted of ‘an emphatic “monumental porch”’ — thirty-two feet square as Latrobe had proposed — grafted onto an auditorium style church. The porch which Mills called the “vestibule” dominates the south elevation, and fronts upon the street. The body of the church is an octagon, one facet of which abuts the rear of the monumental porch. Within the church directly across from the doorway from the monumental church, the pulpit stands within an acoustically conceived apse, which balances the porch. This bay projects from the northern face of the octagon and was intended to serve as the base of the steeple (never executed). To the east and west corresponding bays project; these contain stairways to the balcony that circumscribe the interior, except the pulpit apse on the north face of the nave. A low saucer dome caps the nave, and its center is pierced by a round monitor or cupola.” The monumental porch adopted “shadow, void and contrasting forms” to register a lasting impression. The design also adopted large forms with least ornamentation with the brown colour of the Aquia stone sandstone accentuating the solemnity of the structure. The placement of the large piers in the porch brought about a shaded interior. The Doric columns with fluted drums also projected out into the light. The overall effect of the porch is thus one of geometrically proportioned and balanced structure.
Present use
In 2004 Monumental Church underwent a significant renovation, during which a monument to the 72 people killed in the fire was replaced by an exact replica. The bodies of the victims are still in a brick crypt below the church.
The documentary Saving Grace-Resurrecting American History, written and directed by Emmy winning writer/director Eric Futterman, follows the process of using laser scanning to recreate the monument in computers, then sending the data to Ireland, where stonecutters used both high tech computer equipment and old-fashioned stone-cutting to create a new 7,000 pound monument.
In 2006, regular tours began, in cooperation with the Valentine Richmond History Center's Court End Passport. The building is open on occasion for other private functions.
- Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
- Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].
