BGuthrie Photos: VA -- Richmond -- Monroe Park and surrounding buildings

VA -- Richmond -- Monroe Park and surrounding buildings:

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Description of Pictures: Not a very interesting park to visit but the buildings around it were interesting.

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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.

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[1] MONRPK_150731_001.JPG	[2] MONRPK_150731_004.JPG	[3] MONRPK_150731_006.JPG
[4] MONRPK_150731_009.JPG	[5] MONRPK_150731_016.JPG	[6] MONRPK_150731_021.JPG
[7] MONRPK_150731_025.JPG	[8] MONRPK_150731_031.JPG	[9] MONRPK_150731_035.JPG
[10] MONRPK_150731_038.JPG	[11] MONRPK_150731_046.JPG	[12] MONRPK_150731_050.JPG
[13] MONRPK_150731_058.JPG	[14] MONRPK_150731_062.JPG	[15] MONRPK_150731_071.JPG
[16] MONRPK_150731_074.JPG	[17] MONRPK_150731_080.JPG	[18] MONRPK_150731_083.JPG
[19] MONRPK_150731_087.JPG	[20] MONRPK_150731_090.JPG	[21] MONRPK_150731_097.JPG
[22] MONRPK_150731_100.JPG	[23] MONRPK_150731_102.JPG	[24] MONRPK_150731_105.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. MONRPK_150731_001.JPG: Erected by the 7th Army Corps Veterans Assn & Auxiliary To commemorate the memory of Gen. Fitzhugh Lee commanding 7th Army Corps CSA, 1898-1899
2. MONRPK_150731_009.JPG: To exalted citizenship in the private walks of life, as illustrated by the career of Joseph Bryan this statue is dedicated to the people of Richmond.
3. MONRPK_150731_046.JPG: Altria Theater Altria Theater From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Altria Theater in Richmond, Virginia, United States is a theater at the southwest corner of Monroe Park, the largest venue of Richmond CenterStage's performing arts complex. Formerly known as The Mosque and The Landmark, the Altria Theater was constructed in 1926 to be used by the Shriners as the ACCA Temple Shrine. The city purchased the building in the 1940s and refurbished it between 1994 and 1995. In 1995 the name was officially changed from The Mosque to Landmark Theater. After a $10 million renovation gift from the company, the theater was officially dubbed the Altria Theater in February 2014. It is currently a very popular venue, hosting a number of big-name musical and theatrical performers each year. The theater was designed in Moorish Revival style by Marcellus Wright, Sr. in association with Charles M. Robinson and Charles Custer Robinson in 1925 and completed in 1926.
4. MONRPK_150731_080.JPG: Monroe Park In 1851 the City of Richmond planned a series of parks including Western Square now known as Monroe Park. In the 1850s it served as grounds for what became the state fair organized by the Virginia State Agricultural Society. During the Civil War it was the site of a Confederate instructional camp, and in 1864, a military hospital. In 1866, some of the city's earliest baseball games were played here. Its development as a park began in 1869 in one of Richmond's emerging fashionable neighborhoods. The park contains a pattern of walks radiating from an elaborate four-tiered, cast-iron fountain. A portion of it once was a playground and it has been the scene of political rallies, protest demonstrations, and concerts.
5. MONRPK_150731_087.JPG: Find Art Doors Bizhan Khodebandeh "Draw"
6. MONRPK_150731_090.JPG: Wickham "Soldier, Statesman, "Patriot, Friend." Presented to the City of Richmond by comrades in the Confederate Army and employees of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company. Williams Carter Wickham From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Williams Carter Wickham (September 21, 1820 – July 23, 1888) was a lawyer, judge, politician, and an important Confederate cavalry general who fought in the Virginia campaigns during the American Civil War. After the war, he held various political posts and was the President of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway company. Early life and career Wickham was the son of William Fanning Wickham and Anne Butler (née Carter) Wickham. His paternal grandfather was John Wickham, the constitutional lawyer. On his mother's side, he descended from historic roots, as the Nelson and Carter families were each First Families of Virginia, prominent in the Virginia Colony. Wickham's great-grandfather, Gen. Thomas Nelson, Jr., was one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and a governor of Virginia during the American Revolutionary War. Other ancestors include Thomas "Scotch Tom" Nelson who was one of the founders of Yorktown in the late 17th century. He was also a descendant of Robert "King" Carter (1663–1732), who served as an acting royal governor of Virginia and was one of its wealthiest landowners in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. His mother was a first cousin of Robert E. Lee, whose mother Anne Hill (née Carter) Lee, was born at Shirley Plantation. Wickham was born in Richmond, Virginia, but spent much of his youth on his father's 3,200-acre (13 km2) plantation, Hickory Hill, which is located about 20 miles (32 km) north of Richmond and 5 miles (8.0 km) east of Ashland in Hanover County. Hickory Hill was long an outlying appendage to Shirley Plantation, much of it having come into possession of the Carter family by a deed dated March 2, 1734. Wickham was graduated from the University of Virginia and was admitted to the bar in 1842. He was married to Lucy Penn Taylor and had several children. He became a justice and was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1849. In 1858 he was commissioned captain of Virginia volunteer militia cavalry, and in 1861 he was elected by the people of Henrico County to the state convention as a Unionist, where he voted against the articles of secession. Civil War Following the secession of Virginia, Wickham took his company, the Hanover Dragoons, into the service of the Confederate States Army. After participating in the First Battle of Manassas, Wickham was commissioned by Governor John Letcher as lieutenant colonel of the Fourth Virginia Cavalry in September 1861. On May 4, 1862, he incurred a severe saber wound during a cavalry charge at the Battle of Williamsburg. In this state of injury, he was captured, but quickly paroled. In August 1862, he was commissioned Colonel of the Fourth Virginia Cavalry. At the Battle of Sharpsburg, he was wounded again, this time in the neck by a shell fragment. Recovering, he participated in the battles of Chancellorsville, Brandy Station and Gettysburg. General Wade Hampton blamed the failures of Wickham's Fourth Virginia Cavalry at Brandy Station for the death of his brother, Lt. Col. Frank Hampton. Wickham was commissioned brigadier general on September 9, 1863, and put in command of Wickham's brigade of Fitzhugh Lee's division. On May 11, 1864, he fought at the Battle of Yellow Tavern. Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart was mortally wounded during this engagement, with his final order being: "Order Wickham to dismount his brigade and attack." In September 1864, after the Confederate defeat at the Battle of Fisher's Hill, Wickham blocked at Milford an attempt by Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan to encircle and destroy the Confederate forces of Maj. Gen. Jubal Early. He then attacked the Federal cavalry at Waynesboro and forced them to retreat to Bridgewater. Wickham resigned his commission on October 5, 1864, and took his seat in the Second Confederate Congress, to which he had been elected while in the field. Recognizing that the days of the Confederacy were over, he participated in the Hampton Roads Conference in an attempt to bring an early end to the war. Postbellum activities After the surrender of the Confederacy, Wickham was active in improving harmony between the states and reorganizing Virginia's economy, which had been ruined by the war. He became a Republican and voted in 1872 for General Ulysses S. Grant as a member of the Electoral College of Virginia. In November 1865, at the conclusion of the War, he was elected president of the Virginia Central Railroad, which had been one of the most heavily damaged during the War. In 1868, when the Virginia Central merged with the Covington and Ohio Railroad to form the new Chesapeake and Ohio, Wickham was retained as the new company's president. In the new capacity, he was anxious to complete a railroad line to the Ohio River, long a dream of Virginians. However, unlike fellow Confederate officer and railroad leader William Mahone had done, he was unable to secure capital or financing in Virginia, or from Europeans. Turning to New York City, he was successful in attracting an investment group headed by Collis P. Huntington. Fresh from recent completion of the western portion of the U.S. transcontinental railroad as a member of the so-called "Big Four", Huntington joined the effort, became the C&O's new president. His contacts and reputation helped obtain $15 million of funding from New York financiers for the project, which eventually cost $23 million to complete. The final spike ceremony for the 428-mile (689 km) long line from Richmond to the Ohio River was held on January 29, 1873 at Hawk's Nest railroad bridge in the New River Valley, near the town of Ansted in Fayette County, West Virginia. After Huntington assumed the presidency, Wickham served as vice-president of the C&O from 1869 to 1878, when the company went into foreclosure, with Wickham as receiver. In 1878 the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad was sold under foreclosure and reorganized as the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company, with Collis P. Huntington assuming the office of President of the reorganized road; Wickham was named second vice-president. Under their leadership, an additional line was extended east from Richmond through the new Church Hill Tunnel and down the Virginia Peninsula through Williamsburg to reach coal piers located on the harbor Hampton Roads, the East Coast of the United States' largest ice-free port at the small unincorporated town of Newport News in Warwick County. During the ten years from 1878 to 1888, C&O's coal resources began to be developed and shipped eastward. Coal became a staple of the C&O's business at that time, and still was over 125 years later under successor CSX Transportation. The man Wickham brought to Virginia, Collis P. Huntington, went on to develop his holdings in Newport News, where he began the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company and helped the small community become one of only two in Virginia to become an independent city without first having been an incorporated town. In modern times, Newport News, which merged with the former Warwick County in 1958, has grown to become one of the major cities of Hampton Roads. Throughout the years after the Civil War, while developing railroads, Wickham also maintained an active political life. He maintained his offices in Richmond and his residence in Hanover County. He was elected chairman of the Hanover County, Virginia Board of Supervisors in 1871 and as a Senator in the upper house of the Virginia General Assembly in 1883. He was an officer of the C&O and held all of these other positions at the time of his death on July 23, 1888 at his office in Richmond. Death, legacy Wickham was interred in Hickory Hill Cemetery near Ashland, Virginia. A statue of Williams Carter Wickham was given to the City of Richmond by the general's comrades and employees of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in 1891 and was placed in Monroe Park.
Wikipedia Description: Monroe Park
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Monroe Park is a 7.5 acres (3.0 ha) landscaped park located 1 mile (1.6 km) northwest of the Virginia State Capitol Building in Richmond, Virginia. It is named after James Monroe, the fifth President of the United States (1817–1825). The park unofficially demarcates the eastern "point" of the Fan District and is considered to be Richmond's oldest park.

Monroe Park is pentagonal in shape, with an arrangement of paved paths among lawns and mature deciduous trees, intersecting at a cast iron fountain in the center of the area. This Victorian park is currently in the planning process of an historically sensitive, extensive renovation. The "Monroe Park Advisory Council", an organization constituted by Richmond City Councilman William Pantele in 2003, in partnership with the Richmond Department of Parks, Recreation and Commununity Facilities and Richmond's Department of Community Development are leading the renovation initiative.

History

The land on which the Park is located was purchased by the City of Richmond in 1851 at the cost of $13,592.56. Originally, the land was used as the State Agricultural Fair Grounds in the mid-19th century. During the American Civil War the area was used as a military camp and military hospital. A central stone fountain was donated by U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Albert Ordway in 1872. It was later replaced with the current cast iron fountain in the early twentieth century. A bronze monument to Williams Carter Wickham was erected in the Park in 1891. Monroe Park was home to the City's first baseball games.

Park today

The Park is currently nearly surrounded by VCU's Monroe Park campus. In 2005 the Park was installed with public wi-fi technology.

As of now, artificial lighting of the park is relatively poor, though there are plans to significantly improve lighting in the near term. The Park also attracts homeless people, in part due to the proximity of the park to various charitable churches and feeding programs in the area. Monroe Park is currently the site of numerous feedings for homeless and other needy people on Friday and Saturday.
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