Qualla: Petersburg, Virginia

Petersburg, Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Pocahontas Island is not really an island. It is a peninsula on the north shore of the Appomattox River, just above the falls, and people have lived on it for more than eight thousand years. Archaeologists have pulled stone tools from its soil dating to 6,500 BCE. By 1607 it sat in the territory of the Appamatuck, a Powhatan-allied people governed by King Coquonosum and his sister Queen Oppussoquionuske. By the 1800s it had become something rarer: one of the oldest free Black neighborhoods in America, a stop on the Underground Railroad, and a community that would help blueprint the civil rights movement a century later. The city around it grew from a single trading post into the second largest in antebellum Virginia, then nearly burned to the ground in nine months of trench warfare, and has been quietly remaking itself ever since.

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Petersburg, Virginia: Fall Line City

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Taber Andrew Bain from Richmond, VA, USA, CC BY 2.0. Geography wrote the first chapter. The Appomattox River drops here from the Piedmont's hard bedrock to the sandy coastal plain, and the falls stopped river traffic, demanded portage, and offered free waterpower to anyone who could build a mill. In 1645 Virginia ordered Fort Henry...

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Image: Taber Andrew Bain from Richmond, VA, USA | CC BY 2.0

Petersburg, Virginia: Free Before Freedom

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hunter Desportes, CC BY 2.0. Of the 18,366 people the federal census counted in Petersburg in 1860, 3,244 were free Black Americans. That was nearly twenty-six percent of all free residents, the highest proportion of any city in the South. They had built lives in the cracks of a brutal system. First Baptist ...

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Image: Hunter Desportes | CC BY 2.0

Petersburg, Virginia: Nine Months in the Trenches

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah Stierch, CC BY 4.0. When Grant turned south from Cold Harbor in June 1864 and crossed the James, he was aiming at Petersburg because Petersburg fed Richmond. Cut the railroads here and the Confederate capital starved. On June 9, Baldy Smith's XVIII Corps attacked the Dimmock Line, the ring of earthw...

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Image: Sarah Stierch | CC BY 4.0

Petersburg, Virginia: April Second

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mathew Benjamin Brady, Public domain. On April 2, 1865, the lines finally broke. Grant's bombardment opened at dawn; the Sixth Corps drove through the Confederate works southwest of town. The Confederate Alamo at Fort Gregg held just long enough to let Lee organize a retreat. By midnight on April 2-3, Lee's army was ...

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Image: Mathew Benjamin Brady | Public domain

Petersburg, Virginia: Civil Rights Blueprint

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Taber Andrew Bain from Richmond, VA, USA, CC BY 2.0. The same churches that had organized free Black life before the war organized the resistance to Jim Crow after it. Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker, pastor of Gillfield Baptist, had met Martin Luther King Jr. at an interseminary gathering in the early 1950s and the two became close allies. I...

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Image: Taber Andrew Bain from Richmond, VA, USA | CC BY 2.0

Petersburg, Virginia: What Old Towne Holds

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ken Lund from Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0. The compact historic core has been slowly coming back since the 1990s, when the tobacco company Brown & Williamson shut its cigarette plant here in the mid-1980s and took several thousand jobs with it. Restaurants, bars, coffee shops have taken over restored eighteenth- and ninet...

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Image: Ken Lund from Las Vegas, Nevada, USA | CC BY-SA 2.0