The Jacob House

by Harry Kollatz, Jr.

The Jacob House is a small place with a big history. During its most recent years, it deteriorated and got up rooted. Now restored, it’ll be given away to a worthy cause.

Until 1995, Jacob House stood on its original circa-l817 site. Plans for the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Engineering

removed it from 610 W. Cary St. across the street to 619 W. Cary St. Preservationists, religious organizations and members of the Oregon Hill Home Improvement Council (OHHIC) campaigned to keep the house at 610 W. Cary. Some time later, it came into the ownership of developer Stephen Salomonsky. He was aware of the house’s complex story.

“I knew of its history and all that it stood for,” he explains, “and was also fortunate to acquire the adjacent properties that allowed me to do something interesting with Oregon Hill.”

Richmond master builder and prominent Friend (Quaker) George Winston (1759-1826) built Jacob House as a speculative property for the Town of Sydney, a proposed community for Richmond’s then-West End. An 1819 stock crash halted the plan, however, and Sydney’s planned Street grid formed the template for Oregon Hill and the Fan District.

The house was on an elevated lot, close to town and by the newly established Westham Turnpike (Cary Street). The Quakers were involved in anti-slavery activity, including the employment, rather than bondage, of African-Americans. Winston employed free black apprentices who laid their own handmade brick and raised the house’s pinioned rafters. These same bricklayers constructed the Benjamin Latrobe-designed state penitentiary (where the Ethyl Corp. campus is today) and assisted in the construction of the Virginia State Capitol.

Winston also erected the city’s first Friends Meeting House, at 19th and Cary streets, in 1797. According to researchers Dulaney Ward and Charles Pool, under Winston’s direction the free blacks built more than 100 brick buildings in Shockoe Bottom, 30 or more houses in Church Hill and the 1795 mansion of Thomas Rutherfoord (demolished in 1895), at Adams and Franklin streets.

John Jacob(l790-1864), a penitentiary assistant superintendent, was the house’s first recorded resident. A Quaker’s son, Jacob founded what became Grace Baptist Church and lived in the house for many years. During the 1830s he expanded the house to suit the needs of his family of seven. Jacob moved in 1853 to Woodlawn, his estate that stood where Interstate 64 now crosses the Mechanicsville Turnpike.

Another Jacob House resident was French native Lewis Rivalain, whose drawings of insured properties covered by the Mutual Assurance Society of Virginia provide an indispensable record of early Richmond and Virginia buildings, from Mount Vernon to Shockoe’s first 17th Street Market building.

After the Civil War, canal-boat builder John Messier resided in the Jacob House. He enjoyed a short walk from home to his canal-boat building business, which was behind today’s Virginia War Memorial.

Eugene Crehen, another Frenchman, and Richmond’s best illustrator in the mid-19th century, occupied the house from 1886 to 1895. During the Civil War, he was a designer of uniforms and a popular portraitist.

Exactly a century after the brick maker Winston built the house, it be came home to brick maker Edward Thurston Mankin, whose kilns fired the brick for the Carillon, the Virginia Museum and many buildings in restored Colonial Williamsburg.

From 1947 to 1974, Jacob House was an urban mission called the Cary Street Baptist Center. While it was variously occupied and neglected, a city university thrived nearby. But pleas to incorporate Jacob House into VCU’s School of Engineering failed.

In 1995, activist John Alan Schintzius stood in front of a bulldozer in an unsuccessful attempt to keep the Jacob House in place. Early this year Schintzius contacted Salomonsky with an idea for allowing the house to continue its tradition of social involvement while recognizing Richmond’s abolitionist and Quaker history.

A commission of 15 people comprised of historians, preservationists and community members are selecting a suitable charitable organization to occupy it. “The idea is that [a nonprofit] would have offices upstairs and [downstairs] a museum dedicated to raising up the memory of what happened there,” Salomonsky says.

From Richmond Magazine, October 2003, page 136.