History
Tradition holds that Christopher Newport and John Smith first met with Parahunt, Powhatan's son, in May 1607 at this point. In the early 18th century, a ferry was established from a property at the bottom owned by Robert Rocketts to connect the north and south sides of the James River. A neighborhood of low-slung, single-story homes emerged here after the Civil War, and the area was annexed by Richmond from Henrico County in 1905. By the 1960s, the area at the base of the hill bordering Gilies Creek, known as "Fulton Bottom," was mostly home to low and middle income African Americans. The housing stock was regarded as rather shabby, and after very severe flood damage in the early 1970s, the entire Fulton Bottom community was completely demolished, marking Richmond's only neighborhood-wide urban renewal slum clearance.
Residents were promised rehabilitation and new construction, but the space once occupied by Fulton lay empty for a full decade before construction of moderate-income housing began. Many regard the failure to replace the razed housing in Fulton as one of the central failures of the city's urban renewal plans.
Read more about this topic: Fulton Hill
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Attributed to Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)