Qualla: Maymont

Maymont: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Morgan Riley, CC BY 3.0. James Henry Dooley made his money in railroads and steel and Richmond reconstruction, and when he and Sallie May died, they left their hundred-acre estate to the people of the city - no foundation, no admission fee, just a will and a hilltop. That was 1925. A century later, Maymont is still doing what they asked. Children press their faces against the otter tank. Couples get married under the wisteria pergola in the Italian Garden. Bald eagles, here because they cannot survive on their own, watch the visitors back. The mansion the Dooleys built in 1893, lit by gas and wired with one of Richmond's earliest electrical systems, is now a house museum, but it is the grounds that pull people back season after season.

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Image: Morgan Riley | CC BY 3.0

Maymont: The Dooleys' Hilltop

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Packer1028, CC0. 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 sweepin...

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Image: Packer1028 | CC0

Maymont: Two Gardens, Two Centuries

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rodney Martin from Augusta, GA, CC BY 2.0. 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 Co...

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Image: Rodney Martin from Augusta, GA | CC BY 2.0

Maymont: Animals Who Cannot Go Home

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Packer1028, CC0. 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 ...

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Image: Packer1028 | CC0

Maymont: The Servants the House Forgot

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fopseh, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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, Maymon...

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Image: Fopseh | CC BY-SA 3.0

Maymont: The People's Park

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sdkb, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 ...

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Image: Sdkb | CC BY-SA 4.0