Oregon Hill is a historic working-class neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia. Oregon Hill overlooks the James River and Belle Isle and provides access to Hollywood Cemetery. Due to the neighborhood’s proximity to the Monroe Park Campus of Virginia Commonwealth University, the area is sometimes referred to as a student quarter because of its high student population.
William Byrd III established a rural estate on the property in 1758. Wealthy heiress Grace Arents helped build many institutions to serve the community.
History
In 1758, William Byrd III built his country house Belvidere on this hill, with views of the James River, Church Hill (Richmond, VA), and Shockoe Hill. About a century later, the fire destroyed the home and gardens, transforming the neighborhood into agricultural and industrial. The James River and Kanawha Canal construction in 1785 brought boatmen, merchants, millers, and ironworkers to the neighborhood. Bed Bug Exterminator Richmond
Important Quakers who lived in the Oregon Hill neighborhood included Robert Pleasants, and later Samuel Pleasants Parsons, who became superintendent of the Virginia Penitentiary, which once stood on Belvidere Street. As General Superintendent of the canal company, Parsons oversaw its expansion to Lynchburg, Virginia. In 1817, the Harvie family, which owned most of the neighborhood, subdivided it into lots sold to blacks and whites. The Baker House, built by a “free person of color” on Belvidere Street circa 1850, was moved in the 1920s to 617 Cherry Street. The neighborhood’s name refers to quips that employees moving there to be close to work might as well be moving westward to Oregon. The Tredegar Iron Works and Albemarle Paper Company became significant employers by the 1850s. In 1849, the Hollywood Cemetery was developed from what was known as Harvie’s Woods at the neighborhood’s edge.
Most early buildings in the current historic district date from industrial expansion during Reconstruction following the Civil War, when state office buildings replaced some single-family housing. Richmond annexed the neighborhood in 1869. The oldest surviving church building is the Pine Street Baptist Church, built in 1886. The city acquired the land, which became Riverside Park, delimiting the neighborhood’s southern edge, in 1889. The parkkeeper’s house dates from 1900, but the Works Progress Administration constructed many walkways and other buildings in the 1930s. The park sustained substantial damage from tropical storm Gaston in 2004. In the early 1940s, the neighborhood saw many Jewish immigrants fleeing Eastern Europe. The population was extrapolated in the 1960s due to segregation laws.
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