3215 E. Broad St., Richmond
Today, this hilly site is the location of Chimborazo Park, but before the Civil War, Chimborazo Hill served as a training ground for confederate troops.
After they left for battle, free and enslaved men converted former military barracks into the confederacy’s largest military hospital. Between 1862-1865, the hospital treated more than 75,000 soldiers.
Near the end of the war, as Union forces captured the city, freedmen and women created a community here. They built housing on the west side of the hill, repurposing wood from the hospital to create their homes. Federal officials created a Freedmen’s Bureau nearby. Established by Congress in 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau provided food, housing, medical care, and schooling to newly freed people and poor whites in the South. At Chimborazo, the Bureau established a school that opened in June 1865. By November, it enrolled over three hundred students of all ages.
The refugee camp for freedpeople on Chimborazo Hill officially closed in 1865 and in the coming years, the community dispersed as the city bought the surrounding land. In 1870, the school closed. Due largely to the racist backlash of white Southern leaders, Congress abruptly closed the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1872. In 1874, the city approved plans for the creation of Chimborazo Park on this site and by 1880, City Council had auctioned off the last of the wooden homes where freedpeople once lived. In 1881, the city opened a nearby school for Black children, which eventually became George Mason Elementary School.
Chimborazo Hill typifies the tensions that occur in response to people asserting their right to exist and thrive. This site makes visible the contradictions and false assumptions embedded in the Lost Cause narrative, and foreshadows more recent displacement struggles in East End African American communities. Chimborazo Hill now sits flanked by property owned by increasingly white affluent residents within a gentrifying neighborhood.
To learn more:
- University of Virginia, “Richmond’s Post-Industrial East End.”
- View at https://issuu.com/uvaarch/docs/guidebook_05.25.11
Image: View of Chimborazo Park on top of Chimborazo Hill. Courtesy of Kim Lee Schmidt, 2020.