Forest Hill Park

About this property

Forest Hill Park, known for its "Stone house" called Boscobel, is a historic 105-acre (0.4 km2) urban park in Richmond, Virginia. Starting as a private property, the park has had several owners and uses before its present one, the City of Richmond. The first documented owner was William Byrd III (1728–1777), son of William Byrd II (1674–1744), founder of the city of Richmond. Like his father, the younger Byrd owned extensive properties in Richmond along the James River, and in 1768 he sought to repay his extensive gambling debts by auctioning off 100 of his lots in a public auction. As a result, some 1,730 acres (7 km2) between Reedy Creek and Powhite Creek came to be owned by Bernard Markham. In 1820, Holden Rhodes (born Canada, 1798–99; died Richmond, Virginia, 1857) a graduate of Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont, went to Manchester, near Richmond, to tutor the sons of Judge Samuel Taylor. Rhodes eventually studied law and became a noted jurist in the Chesterfield County court systems, as well as a railroad entrepreneur, being one of the first presidents of the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad, chartered in 1836 and opened in 1838 (later the Atlantic Coast Line, now part of CSX Transportation). After Rhodes married Eliza Anne Cunliffe Heth (daughter of Midlothian coal mine owner John Cunliffe and widow of Henry Heth, the son of Harry Heth, another coal mine owner) in 1833, he purchased 103 acres (0.4 km2), known as "Dunstan's," from John N. Dunstan, Jr. Rhodes built his country estate, "Boscobel" (from bosco bello, Italian for "beautiful woods" ) some time between 1836 and 1843. The house, now known as the Old Stone House in Forest Hill Park, was constructed of granite that is believed to have been quarried on the property. When Rhodes died in 1857, his estate passed to his nephew and adopted son, Charles H. Rhodes, Jr. In 1862, during the American Civil War, young Rhodes sold the property to Richard D. Mitchell. The estate was eventually sold, in turn, to James and Charles Labott, and later to William H. Benson, who in 1871 sold it to a group of New York investors. In 1889, the former Rhodes property was sold to the Southside Land and Improvement Co., and became a terminus for the Forest Hill trolley, part of one of the first successful trolley systems in the United States. The Virginia Passenger and Power Company (later VEPCO, now Dominion Energy) took over the enterprise in 1925. To attract passengers to the countryside, the Rhodes residence was converted into a trolley terminus, complete with wrap-around porch and belfry, and an elaborate turn-of-the-20th-century amusement park was built on the grounds, complete with carousel, roller coaster, fun house, dance hall, penny arcade, and golf course, as well as bath house, swimming area, and boat lake in the former quarry pond. The park remained a popular Richmond attraction until it closed in 1932, due to the economic constraints of the Great Depression.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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