Nine Mile Road is a historic highway located in Henrico County and the independent city of Richmond, Virginia, USA. It was named for its length between a junction with the Williamsburg-Richmond Stage Road (present-day U.S. Route 60) at Seven Pines and Richmond, which had replaced Williamsburg as the capital city of Virginia in 1780.
The Nine Mile Road was a major artery during the Peninsula Campaign during the American Civil War (1861-1865). Successfully defending Richmond, Confederate General Robert E. Lee maintained headquarters there at Dabbs House during the Seven Days Battles in the summer of 1862.
In 1888, the Seven Pines Railway Company was chartered and built an electric trolleycar line along the entire length to reach the National Cemetery at Seven Pines. Wealthy Winthrop, Massachusetts developer Edmund Sewell Read planned and built the new community of Highland Springs along the line.
At the eastern terminus, after World War I, Oliver J. Sands, the President of the Richmond-Fairfield Railway Company (a successor to the Seven Pines Railway), led an investment group which purchased government surplus houses. The community chose the name Sandston in his honor.
In modern times, the Nine Mile Road carries State Route 33 from Richmond towards its eastern terminus near Deltaville at Stingray Point on the Chesapeake Bay.
Famous quotes containing the words mile and/or road:
“For half a mile from the shore it was one mass of white breakers, which, with the wind, made such a din that we could hardly hear ourselves speak.... This was the stormiest sea that we witnessed,—more tumultuous, my companion affirmed, than the rapids of Niagara, and, of course, on a far greater scale. It was the ocean in a gale, a clear, cold day, with only one sail in sight, which labored much, as if it were anxiously seeking a harbor.... It was the roaring sea, thalassa exeessa.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Ev’ry road I walk along I’ve walked along with you.”
—Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960)