Historic Fredericksburg Foundation Seeks Historic District Status for College Terrace Neighborhood
The state Board of Historic Resources approved the first step in the process last week.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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The Historic Fredericksburg Foundation, Inc. is seeking state—and potentially national—recognition of the historic significance of Fredericksburg’s College Terrace neighborhood.
HFFI’s preservationist Danae Peckler and neighborhood resident and architectural historian Helen Ross presented a preliminary information form at the quarterly meeting of the State Board of Historic Resources in Richmond last week.
The board voted to approve the form and agreed that the neighborhood is eligible for listing in the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places.
“Approval of the preliminary information form is the first step in prepping a National Register nomination for [the district],” Peckler said this week. “The [form] lays out a description of the neighborhood and physical characteristics that comprise it, along with sufficient historical informaiton to demonstrate how it is important.”
The College Terrace neighborhood consists of about two dozen residential blocks and some 477 buildings lying between Sunken Road and Washington Avenue, according to the preliminary information form. Most of the buildings in the neighborhood were built between the 1920s and 1950s, and there is a mix of single-family dwellings, duplexes, triplexes, and multi-family apartment buildings.
The neighborhood’s oldest home is on Littlepage Street and was constructed in the 1860s by Fredericksburg merchant James H. Bradley.
Until the early 1900s, the area was made up of farmland and forested space, with a tannery and a shirt factory on the outskirts. When the adjacent Fredericksburg State Normal School—now the University of Mary Washington—opened in 1909, interest grew in developing the area as a residential neighborhood.
Cornell Street was the first paved road in the neighborhood, built for $1,039 to connect the turn-of-the-century homes on Washington Avenue with the Normal School.
The neighborhood continued to grow during the 1930s because of the nearby Sylvania Industrial Corporation, which kept people employed and kept Fredericksburg from being significantly affected by the Great Depression.
The proposed College Terrace historic district includes Memorial Park, also known as Kenmore Park, which was dedicated in 1964 after decades of discussion at the City Council level about what to do with the low-lying “swampland” around Kenmore Avenue.
The Planning Commission in 1949 drew up a plan to manage the area and sent in truckloads of fill dirt to stablilize it, according to the preliminary information form.
College Terrace also has ties to the local Black population through the late-nineteenth-century Shiloh Cemetery on Monument Avenue. The cemetery was deeded to Shiloh Baptist Church by the General Assembly in 1880 and graves from Potter’s field (the area near the old Maury School) were moved there.
Among those who are buried in the cemetery are Joseph Walker and Jason Grant, for whom Walker-Grant Middle School and the Walker-Grant Center are named; Reverend B.H. Hester, the longtime minister of Shiloh Baptist Church (Old Site); and Reverend M.L. Murchison, minister of New Site.
“The College Terrace neighborhood is significant as a relatively intact and cohesive collection of residential forms that continue to cater to a range of dwelling seekers,” the preliminary information form states, and according to a press release issued by HFFI last week, the neighborhood “maintains some of the highest levels of historic integrity” outside Fredericksburg’s downtown historic district.
Residents of the College Terrace neighborhood have been advocating since last summer for the creation of a Conservation District to protect it from “incompatible re-development,” the press release states.
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