89 Fun Facts About Richmond, Virginia

Which planter commissioned the original town grid of Richmond in 1737?

William Byrd II. On one 1733 journey he planned two towns at the falls of two rivers: this one on the James, and Petersburg on the Appomattox.

Richmond, Virginia, is thought to be named after an English town on which river?

The Thames. By tradition, the town's founder thought the James at the falls looked like the view from Richmond Hill, high above the Thames west of London.

Where in Richmond did Patrick Henry deliver 'Give me liberty or give me death!' in 1775?

St. John's Church. Nobody wrote the speech down: the text we quote was pieced together decades later by biographer William Wirt, from the memories of men who had heard it.

Richmond replaced which city as the capital of Virginia during the Revolutionary War?

Williamsburg. Lawmakers moved upriver partly to be safer from British attack, yet within a year Benedict Arnold's raiders came up the James and set the new capital alight.

As minister to France, Jefferson modelled the Virginia State Capitol on which Roman temple?

The Maison Carrée at Nîmes. After sending the plans home he visited Nîmes in 1787 and wrote of 'gazing whole hours' at the temple, 'like a lover at his mistress'.

In May 1861 the Confederate Congress voted to move its capital to Richmond from which city?

Montgomery. The move put the Confederate capital only about a hundred miles from Washington, and 'On to Richmond' became the Union's rallying cry for years.

Which Richmond ironworks made the armour plating for the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia?

Tredegar. When Richmond burned in April 1865, owner Joseph Anderson posted his armed workers' battalion around the works to keep the mob out, and it survived the fire.

Richmond's 1865 Evacuation Fire, lit by retreating Confederates, was finally put out by whom?

Union soldiers. The mayor went out to surrender the burning city, and the troops who marched in to occupy the Confederate capital spent their first hours fighting its fires.

Which US president walked through Richmond's smoking ruins in April 1865, days after the Confederates abandoned it?

Abraham Lincoln. He came ashore with his son Tad on the boy's twelfth birthday, and freed people who recognised him crowded round as he walked to Jefferson Davis's house.

Three decades before Nat Turner, which enslaved blacksmith planned an 1800 uprising to seize Richmond?

Gabriel. Two enslaved men gave the plot away hours before a torrential rainstorm kept the rebels from gathering, and he and 25 others were hanged.

In 1888 Richmond became the first city with a large, successful network of what?

Electric streetcars. Dozens of earlier attempts had failed, but Frank Sprague's cars climbed Richmond's steep hills on overhead wires, and cities around the world copied the design.

Which Richmond neighbourhood was known as the 'Harlem of the South'?

Jackson Ward. Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday played the Hippodrome on Second Street, and in the 1950s a turnpike, now part of Interstate 95, was driven through the middle of the neighbourhood.

In 1903, Maggie L. Walker of Richmond became the first African American woman to do what?

Charter a bank. Her St. Luke Penny Savings Bank survived the Depression through mergers, and a century later its successor was the oldest continually Black-run bank in the country.

Which two US presidents are buried in Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery?

Monroe and Tyler. Monroe died in New York City and lay there for 27 years before Virginia brought him home, to a cast-iron Gothic tomb that Richmonders call 'the Birdcage'.

Hollywood Cemetery, established in 1847, got its name from what?

An abundance of holly trees. Designer John Notman kept the site's hills, ravines and woods and wound the paths around them, so Richmonders came to stroll there as they would in a park.

In January 1935, Richmond was the first place where which drink went on sale in cans?

Beer. New Jersey brewer Krueger sent its first cans to Richmond as a trial, and the drinkers' warm reception there persuaded it to keep canning.

Which Richmond-born athlete won Wimbledon in 1975 by beating defending champion Jimmy Connors?

Arthur Ashe. As a schoolboy he was shut out of Richmond's whites-only courts and tournaments; in 1996 the city put his statue on Monument Avenue, among its Confederate generals.

Which Richmond-born politician was the first African American elected governor of a US state?

Douglas Wilder. The grandson of enslaved Virginians won the 1989 race by fewer than 7,000 votes out of almost 1.8 million, then came back at 73 to run Richmond as its mayor.

Edgar Allan Poe joined the staff of which Richmond magazine in 1835?

The Southern Literary Messenger. Its owner fired Poe within weeks, reportedly for drinking, took him back that autumn and had made him editor by December.

Richmond bills itself as the only US city with what feature of the James River running through it?

Class IV rapids. The James tumbles across the fall line in the middle of the city, so rafters and kayakers run Class III and IV whitewater within sight of the downtown skyline.

Belle Isle, now a park in the James River at Richmond, served as what during the Civil War?

A prison camp. The river made escape hard, so the Confederacy penned captured Union privates on the island with no barracks, only tents for some, through summer heat and winter frost.

Which Richmond estate did a Gilded Age couple will to the city as a park?

Maymont. The estate was named for Sallie May Dooley, and she and her husband James willed all 100 acres to the people of Richmond; it passed to the city on her death in 1925.

The Richmond Flying Squirrels arrived in 2010 as the Double-A affiliate of which MLB club?

San Francisco Giants. The franchise moved from Connecticut after Richmond's Braves left for Georgia, and newspaper readers picked its name over Rock Hoppers, Rhinos and Hush Puppies.

Two years after forming, soccer's Richmond Kickers won which national trophy in 1995?

The U.S. Open Cup. The Kickers were a fourth-tier side that year, yet they beat the El Paso Patriots on penalties in Texas to take the national knockout title.

Which head coach took VCU from the First Four to the Final Four of the 2011 NCAA tournament?

Shaka Smart. In only his second season, his eleventh-seeded Rams won five games in a row, the last over top-seeded Kansas, before losing the semi-final to Butler.

VCU was created in 1968 by merging the Richmond Professional Institute with what?

The Medical College of Virginia. It began in 1838 as the medical department of Hampden-Sydney College, which is why VCU dates its founding 130 years before the merger.

In NASCAR terms, Richmond Raceway is which kind of venue?

A short track. At three-quarters of a mile it sits under NASCAR's one-mile line; it opened in 1946 as a half-mile dirt oval at the fairgrounds and was stretched in 1988.

Richmond's Virginia Museum of Fine Arts owns five of which Russian imperial treasures?

Fabergé eggs. Lillian Thomas Pratt, urged on by the dealer Armand Hammer, collected the tsars' jewelled Easter gifts and willed all five to the young museum in 1947.

Richmond is one of the few US cities with both a US Court of Appeals and which other national institution?

A Federal Reserve Bank. Bigger Baltimore was in an uproar when Richmond was chosen in 1914, and Baltimore ended up with a branch office of the Richmond bank.

Richmond-based Reynolds Metals launched which kitchen staple in 1947?

Aluminium foil. Reynolds had rolled foil for packaging since 1926, and after the war began selling it by the roll to home cooks under the name Reynolds Wrap.

Tobacco magnate Lewis Ginter built which grand landmark on Richmond's Franklin Street?

The Jefferson Hotel. A fire in 1901 destroyed much of the building, and the rebuilding produced the lobby and grand staircase that guests see today.

Richmond tobacco firm Allen & Ginter tucked which collectibles into its 1880s cigarette packs?

Trading cards. Its cards, among America's first made for collecting, pictured baseball players and other champions in 1887, and in 2006 Topps revived the Allen & Ginter name for baseball cards.

As of 2025, which of these Fortune 500 companies has its headquarters in the Richmond area?

CarMax. It began in 1993 as a side project of Richmond electronics chain Circuit City, was spun off in 2002 and outlived its parent, which went out of business in 2009.

At the 2020 census Richmond ranked only fourth among its state's cities, so which city came first?

Virginia Beach. The resort town absorbed the whole of Princess Anne County in 1963, and by 2020 its 459,000 residents were double Richmond's count.

Which future US president was honorary head of the company formed to dig a canal around the falls at Richmond?

George Washington. Virginia gave him 100 shares in the canal company, and he passed them on to a small academy that took his name and is now Washington and Lee University.

Richmond's Reconciliation Statue has matching statues in Benin and which English city?

Liverpool. Sculptor Stephen Broadbent's three identical bronzes stand at the corners of the slave-trade triangle: the English port that sent the ships, West Africa and Virginia.

Which grotesquely costumed heavy metal band was formed in Richmond in 1984?

Gwar. It started as a joke opening act for singer Dave Brockie's punk band, played in monster costumes that VCU art students had built for a film, and the joke outlasted the band.

Which member of the Breaking Bad team was born in Richmond?

Vince Gilligan. A script he wrote at film school won Virginia's Governor's Screenwriting Award in 1989, and one of the judges, producer Mark Johnson, later made it as the film Home Fries.

Which neo-soul pioneer was born in Richmond, the son and grandson of Pentecostal preachers?

D'Angelo. Born Michael Archer on Richmond's Southside, he grew up playing piano in church, left school for New York at 18 and released his debut album, Brown Sugar, three years later.

In February 1864, 109 captured Union officers escaped by tunnel from where in Richmond?

Libby Prison. They dug from a rat-infested cellar that the guards avoided and came up in a vacant lot across the street; 59 of them made it back to Union lines.

Which Richmond neighbourhood of townhouses, lying between VCU and the Museum District, is home to part of Monument Avenue?

The Fan. Around 1900 builders filled almost a hundred blocks with rows of townhouses for Richmond's new middle class, and so many survive that the whole district is protected as historic.

John Smith went along, but which captain led the 1607 Jamestown expedition up the James to the falls at today's Richmond?

Christopher Newport. On an island at the falls he set up a cross marked 'Jacobus Rex, 1607', claiming the river and the country around it for King James.

Which famous captive was taught Christianity by the minister of Henricus, the 1611 settlement downriver from Richmond?

Pocahontas. Taken hostage in 1613, she was baptised with the name Rebecca and met the colonist John Rolfe, whom she married in 1614.

In April 1863, hungry Richmond women led a riot through the Confederate capital's shops that is named after which food?

Bread. Virginia's governor had refused to hear a delegation of hungry women, so the crowd swept through the shops and left only when troops were called out and threatened to open fire.

Which Confederate general's statue, taken down in December 2022, was the last city-owned Confederate monument in Richmond?

A. P. Hill. The general lay buried beneath his own statue in the middle of a crossroads, so removing the monument meant exhuming him too; he was reburied in Culpeper, his home town.

Which Richmond-born tap dancer has a statue in his boyhood neighbourhood?

Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson. His signature routine was tapping up and down a flight of stairs, and in 1989 Congress made his birthday, 25 May, National Tap Dance Day.

What did Richmond finish in the 1990s to shield Shockoe Bottom from the James?

Flood wall. It kept the river out and restaurants and bars moved in, yet in 2004 the district flooded anyway when the remnants of Hurricane Gaston dumped a foot of rain.

Richmond's Science Museum of Virginia occupies which grand neoclassical building?

Broad Street Union Station. Architect John Russell Pope won the 1913 design competition and later brought the same domed classicism to the Jefferson Memorial; the trains left in 1975.

At Richmond's Triple Crossing, three what pass one above another at the same spot?

Railway lines. Three rival companies' tracks cross on three levels beside the river, and more than once their crews posed a train on every level at the same moment for the cameras.

Which general, fighting for the British, led the raid that burned much of Richmond in January 1781?

Benedict Arnold offered to spare the city if he could seize every parcel of tobacco in it, and ordered Richmond put to the torch when Virginia's governor refused.

Which former vice president stood trial for treason in Richmond in 1807 and was acquitted?

Aaron Burr was accused of scheming to set up an independent country in the Southwest; the jury cleared him, but the scandal finished his political career.

Which Oscar-winning actress, the older sister of Warren Beatty, was born in Richmond in 1934?

Shirley MacLaine was named after the child star Shirley Temple and won her Best Actress Oscar for Terms of Endearment; her family left Richmond while she was still a child.

Henry 'Box' Brown escaped slavery in Richmond in 1849 by having himself shipped in a wooden crate to which city?

Philadelphia abolitionists opened the crate after a 27-hour journey by wagon, railroad and steamboat; it was only about three feet long and was labelled as dry goods.

Which nickname, said to honour a lanky 1890s baseball pitcher, do University of Richmond sports teams use?

Spiders is a nickname no other university in the United States uses; one story credits a reporter who compared pitcher Puss Ellyson's long arms and kick to a spider's legs.

Which electronics chain, liquidated in 2009, began as the Wards Company television shop in Richmond in 1949?

Circuit City grew from the shop Samuel Wurtzel opened after seeing television arrive in the South on a visit to a Richmond barber shop; it went on to pioneer the electronics superstore.

Which leader's home from 1861 to 1865 was the Richmond mansion now known as the White House of the Confederacy?

Jefferson Davis moved in with three small children after the Confederate government leased the 1818 house from the city; it later housed the Confederate Museum for eight decades.

Which kitchen product, sold as Reynolds Wrap, made a household name of a company long headquartered in Richmond?

Aluminum foil made Reynolds a household name, but the firm started out making lead and tin foil wrappers for cigarette and candy companies before moving to Richmond in 1938.

Which former mayor of Richmond was Hillary Clinton's running mate in the 2016 presidential election?

Tim Kaine led the city from 1998 to 2001 before serving as lieutenant governor, governor and senator; Barack Obama also short-listed him as a running mate in 2008.

Which Super Bowl-winning quarterback grew up in Richmond, where he starred at the Collegiate School?

Russell Wilson was born in Cincinnati but raised in Richmond, where the local newspaper twice named him its player of the year before he won a title with Seattle.

The James River, the longest in Virginia, flows through Richmond before emptying into which body of water?

Chesapeake Bay is the end of a 348-mile run from the Appalachian Mountains; English colonists named the river in 1607 after King James I.

Before 1865, Richmond's Shockoe Bottom was the second-largest slave market in the United States, behind which city?

New Orleans alone was larger; around Richmond's 15th Street, dozens of dealers and auction houses made the trade in human beings the engine of the city's economy.

Richmond's Libby Prison, which held Union officers, was dismantled in 1889 and rebuilt as a museum in which city?

Chicago got the old warehouse because a local candy maker, Charles Gunther, bought it and had it moved north as a war museum; a castellated wall of that museum later became part of an arena.

A steam locomotive has lain buried since a 1925 railway tunnel collapse beneath which Richmond neighbourhood?

Church Hill still entombs the work train and its ten flat cars; four men died, and engineers fear that digging the train out would open sinkholes under nearby homes.

Which chief justice of the United States lived for 45 years in a Richmond house that is now a museum?

John Marshall built the house in 1790 and raised six children there while writing landmark rulings such as Marbury v. Madison; he lived in it until his death in 1835.

Monumental Church in Richmond is a memorial to the 72 people, Virginia's governor among them, killed by what in 1811?

A theatre fire broke out before a packed Christmas-season audience of about 600, and the stage curtain hid the first flames; 54 of the dead were women.

Which general's statue, the first on Richmond's Monument Avenue in 1890, was taken down in September 2021?

Robert E. Lee's statue was made in France, and newspapers of the day said 10,000 people helped pull the wagons carrying its pieces through the city before the unveiling.

Which city south of Richmond fell in April 1865 after a nine-month siege, forcing the Confederate government to flee?

Petersburg was the railroad and supply lifeline 23 miles from the capital, so when Union troops broke through its defences on 2 April, officials left Richmond that same night.

Which Union general's Peninsula campaign reached the outskirts of Richmond in 1862 before the Seven Days Battles?

George McClellan landed his army at Fort Monroe and crept up the Virginia Peninsula, only for a week of fighting at the city's edge to turn his advance into a humiliating defeat.

Which Richmond-born abolitionist ran a Union spy ring inside the Confederate capital during the Civil War?

Elizabeth Van Lew's network reached clerks inside the Confederate War and Navy Departments, and she passed what it learned about troop movements to Union commanders.

Chimborazo Hill, site of a vast Confederate hospital in Richmond, is said to be named after a volcano in which country?

Ecuador's Chimborazo lent its name to the hill, where a wartime hospital of ninety whitewashed wards became known for its meticulous record keeping.

The Richmond 34, arrested in a 1960 sit-in at Thalhimers department store, studied at which Black college?

Virginia Union University had hosted a talk by Martin Luther King Jr. weeks before the sit-in, and the boycott that followed the arrests saw the store integrated by the end of 1960.

What is the name of Virginia's legislature, which meets in Richmond and is the oldest in the Americas?

General Assembly sessions began in 1619 with a single chamber on orders from the Virginia Company of London; today 100 delegates and 40 senators sit in two houses.

Richmond grew up where the James River crosses which geological boundary between the Piedmont and the Tidewater?

The Fall Line was as far upstream as ocean-going ships could sail, so cargo changed boats here, and water power from the falls made the city an industrial centre.

In 1970 Richmond annexed a large area on its southern side from which county, which fought the move in court?

Chesterfield lost the land and its 47,000 residents after several years of court cases; the county also gave its name to a well-known brand of cigarette.

Which independent city on the south bank of the James River merged with Richmond in 1910?

Manchester was the first of Virginia's independent cities to give up its identity, and it agreed only on condition that a toll-free bridge be built across the river.

Agecroft Hall, a 15th-century manor house rebuilt in Richmond in the 1920s, was shipped in crates from which country?

England lost the Lancashire manor after coal pits and railways had ruined its setting, and a Richmond businessman with tobacco and banking interests bought it at auction in 1925.

The 240-foot Carillon in Richmond's Byrd Park is Virginia's memorial to the dead of which war?

World War I cost the lives of roughly 3,700 Virginians, and the tower, finished in 1932, honours the soldiers, sailors, marines and women from the state who served in it.

Which MLB club's Triple-A affiliate played in Richmond from 1966 until it moved to Gwinnett County in 2009?

Atlanta Braves prospects spent 43 seasons in Richmond, the last of them at a ballpark called The Diamond that was built for the team in 1985.

Altria, the tobacco giant headquartered beside Richmond, was known until a 2003 rebranding by which name?

Philip Morris took the new name partly to shield its other businesses from the political pressure on tobacco, and moved its headquarters from New York to Richmond in 2008.

Which fictional chief medical examiner works in Richmond in Patricia Cornwell's crime novels, beginning with Postmortem?

Kay Scarpetta was inspired by Virginia's real chief medical examiner, Marcella Fierro, and Cornwell wrote from the inside, having worked in that office herself.

Which cigarette brand began in 1871 as a plug chewing tobacco made by R. A. Patterson of Richmond?

Lucky Strike took its name from the gold rushes of the era, to suggest a top-quality find, and only became a cigarette in the early 1900s.

Which heavy metal band was formed in 1994 by Virginia Commonwealth University students under the name Burn the Priest?

Lamb of God spent five years rehearsing and gigging around Virginia under its first name, then changed it partly to avoid being mistaken for a satanic metal band.

Which French sculptor carved the marble George Washington in Virginia's Capitol rotunda from a life mask?

Jean-Antoine Houdon crossed the Atlantic in 1785 at Benjamin Franklin's invitation so that his subject could sit for him, and the statue has been copied many times since.

Richmond's Martin Agency created a lizard mascot and a troupe of cavemen for which insurance company?

GEICO and the Richmond agency are credited with pioneering a new style of insurance advertising in the early 1990s that rivals soon imitated; Adweek named the firm its US agency of the year in 2009.

Which amusement park in Doswell, twenty miles north of Richmond, greets visitors with a one-third-scale Eiffel Tower?

Kings Dominion opened in 1975 as a sister to Ohio's Kings Island and borrows the second half of its name from Virginia's nickname, the Old Dominion.

In Richmond in 1788, Virginia's delegates narrowly voted to ratify which document over Patrick Henry's objections?

The US Constitution passed by 89 votes to 79 after James Madison led the case for it, and the convention attached a call for the amendments that Madison later steered through Congress.

Which spy drama starring Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison filmed its seventh season in Richmond?

Homeland began shooting in Richmond in September 2017 for a story set in Washington, then wrapped the season in Budapest the following March.

Which Richmond daily newspaper was created in 1903 when the city's two morning papers agreed to merge?

The Times-Dispatch took half its name from each parent after the owners accepted that the city could not support four dailies; the two evening papers merged the same year.

The 90-foot granite memorial to Confederate soldiers in Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery, built in 1869, takes what shape?

A pyramid designed by Charles Dimmock stands over more than 11,000 enlisted men buried around it, and it became the emblem of the women's association that tended their graves.