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:
“A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.”
—Aristide Briand (1862–1932)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)