History Thursday: UMW Student Project Maps Racially Restrictive Covenants in Fredericksburg

"Restricted" is an ongoing project exploring how these covenants shaped the city's built environment.

By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
Email Adele

Plat for Elmhurst Subdivision, 1934. Courtesy, Fredericksburg City Courthouse.

Editor’s Note: This story was updated on April 24 at 10:25 a.m. to include a link to the form, titled “Certificate of Release of Certain Prohibited Covenants,” for removing restrictive covenants from deeds.

On August 1, 1936, John F. Gouldman and Benjamin T. Pitts—both real estate developers who served on Fredericksburg City Council—filed a deed of dedication in court establishing a nine-block subdivision, located between the canal, Fall Hill Avenue, Pelham, and Hunter streets, known as “Elmhurst.”

The deed of dedication subdivided the land into individual parcels and included the following language, which applied to all the parcels: “Neither the land nor any part thereof, nor any building or structure that may be erected thereon, shall be sold, conveyed, leased, rented or otherwise disposed of to any other than white persons as the owners or tenants for a period of ninety-nine years from this date.”

Gouldman and Pitts inserted additional restrictive language into the deed, establishing “minimum costs for building materials; regulations on fence construction, roof lines, and setbacks; and a requirement that all structures be single-family, detached residences,” according to an article by Krystyn Moon, professor of history and American studies at the University of Mary Washington.

The Elmhurst deed’s 99-year restriction to white owners and occupants only—which was extended even further when the developers filed a deed of rededication in November of 1948—was among longest, but it’s by far not the only, example of a restrictive covenant in the city.

A multi-year, interdisciplinary project called “Restricted,” carried out by UMW students and guided by Moon, geography professor Stephen Hanna, and historic preservation professor Christine Henry, has resulted in an interactive map of racial covenants in the city, as compared to Black-owned properties in 1930 and 1964.

The results reveal the way Black families were prevented from migrating out of the city and were constrained in parts of downtown and in a few segregated neighborhoods.

Cabin on Water Street (Sophia Street) by Frances Benjamin Johnson, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print.

“These racial covenants led to hypersegregation in Fredericksburg,” said Moon, with developers using such covenants to “rewrite” the landscape, such as by creating “a massive buffer zone” around the UMW campus.

The 40-some houses in the subdivision of Kenmore—four square blocks between Grove Avenue, Sunken Road, and Littlepage Street laid out in the 1930s—have deeds stating, “None of the said property shall be sold or leased to people of African descent for a period of fifty (50) years from September 15, 1929.” There are further restrictive covenants setting requirements for density, setbacks, and house value.

Other subdivisions located below the university, such as College Terrace, Brooks, and Hanover Heights, have covenants stating that owners will not lease or sell “to any other than white persons” or to anyone “who by the law of the State of Virginia is denominated a colored person.”

The impacts of this buffer zone around the university persist to this day, in terms such as “the college on the hill” and the feeling among some residents that UMW “was not a part of their Fredericksburg,” Hanna said.

“[We see] the impact of higher education on where Black families could live,” said Henry. “It results in people not feeling comfortable in the landscape” or able to make use of the campus greenspace for recreation or relaxation.

Specific racial covenants were not the only way property owners in the city sought to restrict ownership, the researchers found. In the Fairgrounds subdivision, located off U.S. 1 just before the Falmouth bridge, homebuyers in 1941 signed a neighborhood agreement stating that lots would not be “sold, leased, used, or occupied by any person of African descent” for 99 years.

The agreement, which was a legal instrument, also noted that the occupancy restriction did not apply to “colored domestic servants” working for the homeowner.

Deeds in the city also included language that more subtly restricted ownership, such as by prohibiting the construction of a flat roof, the keeping of chickens or pigs, or the operation of a business on the property, Henry said.

A total of five UMW students have worked on the project since its inception in January of 2024. The work has involved researching a total of 1,368 deeds held in the records of both Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania circuit courts—since Fredericksburg City annexed parts of Spotsylvania County over the years.

The current student researchers are junior Natalie Lee and sophomore Maggie Alt, who are studying geospatial analysis and history and historic preservation, respectively. They shared with the Advance what they’ve learned through researching Black-owned properties in 1930 and 1964.

Until 1964, record books of land and personal property owned by Black citizens were kept segregated by state law from those owned by white citizens. This was not overturned until the U.S. Supreme Court decision of that year in Hamm v. Virginia State Board of Elections.

In that last year of segregation of property records, the students learned that there were 728 Black-owned properties in the city, up from 200 in 1930—but they were almost all clustered in the neighborhoods of Mayfield and Airport.

New Homes for Colored Families Newspaper Advertisement, Courtesy of newspapers.com

“These are neighborhoods that were advertised to Black families,” Lee said. “So there was an increase in ownership, but it was segregated.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1948 decision in Shelley v. Kraemer made it illegal to enforce racially restrictive covenants. But developers continued to insert them through the 1950s, Alt wrote in an article about the W.R. Dillard subdivision.

Alt, Lee, and the professors hope the “Restricted” project will educate homeowners and lawmakers about restrictive covenants and their impact on the built environment.

In 2020, the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation providing a way for homeowners to remove restrictive covenants from their deeds by filing a Certificate of Release of Certain Prohibited Covenants with the circuit court in their locality. This process doesn’t redact existing language, but it adds a document to the chain of title indicating that the property is released from the covenant.

However, Moon said, many circuit courts have not made it easy for property owners to find the form, and current state law doesn’t prohibit courts from charging fees for the process.

“It should not be a money-making endeavor,” she said.

Local Obituaries

To view local obituaries or to send a note to family and loved ones, please visit the link that follows.