History of Petersburg, Virginia
It was occupied by the British during the American Revolutionary War, and Major-General William Phillips died of fever at Blandford (later a neighborhood of Petersburg) during bombardment from the Marquis de Lafayette's positions north of the river.
For nine months in 1864 and 1865 it was the subject of the Siege of Petersburg; the fall of the city unleashed a chain of events over the following two weeks that resulted in the end of the American Civil War.
[clarification needed] In 2006 archaeological excavations at Pocahontas Island found evidence of prehistoric Native American settlement dated to 6500 B.C.
By 1635 they had patented land along the south bank of the Appomattox River as far west as present-day Sycamore Street, and about 1 mile (1.6 km) inland.
In 1733, Col. William Byrd II (who founded Richmond at the same time) conceived plans for a city at Peter's Point, to be renamed Petersburgh.
[1] During the American Revolutionary War, the British drive to regain control erupted in the Battle of Blanford in 1781, which started just east of Petersburg.
After the Revolutionary War, in 1784 Petersburg annexed the adjacent towns of Blandford (also called Blanford) and Pocahontas and the suburb of Ravenscroft, which became neighborhoods of the city.
[6] For years the center of the free black residential area was Pocahontas Island, a peninsula on the north shore of the Appomattox River.
[8] The Port of Petersburg became renowned as a commercial center for processing cotton, tobacco and metal, then shipping products out of the region.
All these civic improvements helped attract and hold a substantial business community, based on manufacture of tobacco products, but also including cotton and flour mills, and banking.
The depot at Pocahontas Island, built for the Richmond & Petersburg rail line, was a transit point for Confederate troops and supplies.
On June 9, troops led by William F. "Baldy" Smith of the 18th Corps, attacked the Dimmock Line, a series of defensive breastworks constructed in 1861 and 1862 to protect Petersburg against the Army of the Potomac under General George McClellan during the Peninsula Campaign.
A soldier in the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry of the Union Army IX Corp, a coal miner in civilian life, remarked, "We could blow that battery into oblivion if we could dig a mine underneath it."
With the loss of Petersburg's crucial lifelines, the Confederate forces had to retreat, ending the siege in a victory for the Union Army.
The fall of Petersburg meant that Richmond could no longer be defended, Lee attempted to lead his men south to join up with Confederate forces in North Carolina.
In the years after the Civil War, many freedmen migrated to Petersburg for rebuilding, work on the river, and to escape the white control prevalent in more rural areas.
Although in the 1870s, conservative whites took power in the state and began to legislate racial segregation, African Americans continued to create their own businesses and community organizations in Petersburg.
[13] John Mercer Langston, a national political leader and former dean of Howard University's law department, was selected as the college's first president.
The limitations of Petersburg's small geographic area and proximity to Richmond were structural problems that hampered it in adapting to major economic changes in the 20th century.
In 1950 the camp was designated Fort Lee, and additional buildings were constructed to house the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps Center and School.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, Virginia's Democratic Party–dominated legislature instituted Jim Crow laws, including imposing racial segregation.
With many African Americans having served the nation and cause of freedom in WWII, in the postwar years they pressed for social justice, an end to segregation, and restoration of voting power.
Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker, the pastor of Gillfield Baptist Church, had become friends with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the early 1950s when they were both in divinity school.
[16] According to Walker and other close associates of King, Petersburg had played an important role, a kind of blueprint for the national civil rights struggle.
In 1970, Carrie E. Miles, from Ward One-Blandford, became the first African-American Women to hold a seat on the Petersburg Public Schools Board of Education since Reconstruction.
Many middle-class families moved to newer housing in the suburbs and to nearby Richmond, where the economy was expanding with jobs in fields of financial and retail services.
[19] Regional tensions were heightened by the city's two large annexations of adjacent portions of Dinwiddie and Prince George Counties in the early 1970s.
In 1985 city leaders were unable to keep Brown & Williamson tobacco company, a top employer, from relocating to Macon, Georgia.
It was once vibrant near the north end of Sycamore Street but had declined by the late 20th century because of structural changes in industries, and loss of local jobs and customers.
In the early 21st century, Petersburg leaders are highlighting its attractive historical and industrial sites, with associated access to an exceptionally wide transportation network.
