Fulton Hill - History

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.