James H. Dooley was a Richmond lawyer who came home from the Civil War with a permanently injured arm and rebuilt himself, and a piece of the South, in the decades after. By 1893, he and Sallie had finished their Romanesque revival mansion on a bluff above the James, with sweeping views west and south over the river valley. The estate was named for Sallie May Dooley - May for her middle name, Mont for the hilltop. The Dooleys filled the house with what wealth in the Gilded Age made possible: Tiffany glass, hand-carved interiors, a silver swan-shaped centerpiece for the dining table. They had no children. Their gift was the house itself, and the gardens, and the bluff. When they died within months of each other, the city of Richmond inherited the entire estate.

The Italian Garden, completed in 1910, was designed by Henry E. Baskervill of the Richmond firm Noland and Baskervill - now simply Baskervill - and modeled on 15th- and 16th-century classical Italian gardens. It steps down the slope on multiple levels, the Cascade and Fountain Court patterned after the Villa Torlonia near Rome. The Petersburg granite stonework still holds. Below it, the Japanese Garden was added a year later, in 1911, with a section of the old Kanawha Canal incorporated into its watercourse. A torii arch frames the path; a koi pond catches reflections under red maples; a large waterfall drops into the lower pond. After Sallie Dooley's death the Japanese Garden slowly lost its design integrity - until Earth Design renovated it in 1978, reimagining it as a stroll garden where the changing seasons themselves are the exhibit.

Maymont keeps a permanent collection of native Virginia wildlife - and almost every animal there is there because it cannot survive in the wild. A bald eagle that lost flight, a bobcat raised by humans, two black bears with histories that ended their wild lives. Elk and American bison live in larger pastures. The Robins Nature Center holds aquatic Virginia species: river otters, alligators, sharks. The Children's Farm offers horses, sheep, and goats for small hands to touch. Throughout the park, Canada geese settle on the ponds; snapping turtles and bullfrogs and snakes go about their business in the creek that crosses the property. The arboretum holds more than 200 species of trees and woody plants, including exotic champions: a Cedrus atlantica, a Cryptomeria japonica, a Parrotia persica.

Like nearly every Gilded Age American mansion, Maymont ran on labor that the public tour long left out. The Dooleys employed Black domestic workers - cooks, footmen, gardeners, maids - who lived in the basement service wing and made the life upstairs possible. For decades, Maymont presented the house as the Dooleys' alone, as if the silver polished itself. That has changed. The museum now includes the below-stairs domestic service exhibit in its main tour, telling the story of the kitchen, the laundry, the staff quarters, and the people who worked there. Their names were not always written down - the historical record is thin in the way records of Black labor often are - but their work is visible again, where for a long time it was not.

Maymont charges no admission. The Dooleys' will was specific: the estate was a gift, not a venue. Today the gardens host weddings - the wisteria-covered pergola in the Italian Garden is the photograph everyone in Richmond has seen at least once - and the carriage house holds one of the largest historic carriage collections in the country. In 2011 the American Planning Association named Maymont one of the top ten public spaces in America. School groups arrive by the busload. Couples stroll the bluff at dusk. The mansion lights up in winter, the gardens fill with butterflies in summer. The hill the Dooleys chose for the view has, more than a century later, become the place Richmond goes to remember how to slow down.