Qualla: Fifth Street Historic District

Fifth Street Historic District: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit W. Scott Breckinridge Smith, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1895, the German-born painter Bernhard Gutmann walked along a street he called "Negro Street" in Lynchburg and sketched what he saw: half a dozen two- and two-and-a-half-story buildings with steeply pitched side-gable roofs, end chimneys, narrow facades, and shallow second-story porches overhanging the brick sidewalk. The exact block is uncertain, but it almost certainly captured the 600 or 700 block of Fifth Street — the spine of Lynchburg's Black business district. Fifth Street was where Lynchburg's African American community ran its grocery stores, its barbershops, its hotels, its dance halls, its tobacco factories, and its funeral homes. It is also where John Lynch ran the ferry road south of the James River in the 1750s. Eight blocks of that corridor — 57 contributing buildings spanning 1800 to the 1950s — were listed as the Fifth Street Historic District on the National Register in 2012.

Image: W. Scott Breckinridge Smith | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fifth Street Historic District: From Ferry Road to Main Street

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit wsbsmith, CC BY-SA 3.0. Before there was a Lynchburg there was a ferry. In 1757, seventeen-year-old John Lynch began running boats across the James River at the confluence with Blackwater Creek, and the road that climbed up the south bank from the landing became the founding artery of the town. That roa...

Image: wsbsmith | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fifth Street Historic District: Tobacco, Brick, and Bread

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pubdog (talk), Public domain. Lynchburg made its nineteenth-century fortune on tobacco — leaf bought from Piedmont farmers, processed in city factories, twisted and pressed into plugs, and shipped down the James. Two of the largest tobacco factories from that era stand in the district at 409 and 410 Court Str...

Image: Pubdog (talk) | Public domain

Fifth Street Historic District: The Black Business District

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit W. Scott Breckinridge Smith, CC BY-SA 3.0. By the late nineteenth century, with segregation hardening into law, Fifth Street had become the commercial heart of Black Lynchburg — and it stayed that way for nearly a century. The Humbles Building of 1915, three stories of yellow brick at 901 Fifth Street, housed Black-owned ...

Image: W. Scott Breckinridge Smith | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fifth Street Historic District: Cars, Decline, Survival

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit W. Scott Breckinridge Smith, CC BY-SA 3.0. The early automobile age left its mark too. Miller Tire and Battery Company at 400 Fifth, built in 1927, originally had a diagonal porte-cochere that let drivers stop at the office without leaving their cars. The Adams Motor Company building at 811 Fifth, also 1927, was a triple-...

Image: W. Scott Breckinridge Smith | CC BY-SA 3.0