Local Matters: Life, Race, And The Marketplace - Politics, Industry And The Built Environment In Petersburg, Virginia, 1850 - 1890

Markets are extraordinarily fascinating places: Always full of energy and activities, they are the most taken for granted public spaces within the built environments of earlier times. Those of early Petersburg, Virginia wer no different. Petersburg was founded in the early seventeenth century by the first group of English colonists to arrive and settle along the James River. By the eighteenth-century, it was a busy industrial city with an enslaved and freed Black population as large as the Whites. For most of its early history, through to the latter nineteenth century, only Richmond surpassed Petersburg as the most important city in Virginia. With the exception of the emancipation of the enslaved population, little societal related changes occurred after the Civil War. In addition to the immense damage to its infrastructure: the businesses, industrial sectors, the primary market, and the loss of the slave society, the destruction caused by the war resulted in the third building of Petersburg. Tobacco and cotton factories again became mainstays of the industrial sector. The railroads, canal networks, and road infrastructures were rebuilt or repaired. The Centre Markets received a makeover, and Old Farmers' Market was rebuilt to a grand status. As the only source for widespread news and information, the press influenced all parts of Petersburg and the nation's societies. The post war emergence of Black newspapers, helped by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1875, allowed the addition of Black voices to counter the longstanding prevalence of racial rants and slurs from the established White press. Life, race, and the marketplace were all encouraged, supported, or targeted by the newspapers as they reported on the local matters of the city on the Upper Appomattox.