53: a few facts, trolley tour, rachel and the serial killer, alligators at the jefferson, fancy club, secret sandwich society, bruce's house, lumpkin's jail, monumental fire, barbara johns walks out, poe house, spy ring, my search for beer, mr. ash

June 4, 2025

Richmond - Day 2

A few quick facts about Richmond before we head out today:
* Sibling actors Shirley MacLaine and Warren Beatty were both born in Richmond in the 1930s.
* Richmond is on the exact same latitude (37.5407° N) as Athens (Greece), San Francisco, and Valencia (Spain).
* John Tyler (1790–1862), our tenth president, had a child when he was 63 years old (Lyon Tyler). Lyon had a son (Harrison Tyler) at the age of 75. Because Harrison lived until the age of 96, this resulted in a span of 235 years between our 10th president's birth and his grandson's death. Harrison died ten days ago.
* Although a loose connection, Dr. Mary E. Walker has ties with Richmond because she was held here as a prisoner of war, at Castle Thunder (if I'm ever a prisoner, I hope to be held in a place with a name this cool). She was the first and only woman to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor, awarded in 1865 for her service as a surgeon during the Civil War. Later, in 1917, the award was rescinded from her due to changes in eligibility criteria, then reinstated in 1977. She didn't return it in the interim.
* As of 2016, 24.8% of Richmond residents were living below the federal poverty line. It's improved some since then, and in 2023 was down to 18.8%, but is still above the national averages of Virginia (10.2%, and 11th best in the US) and of the United States (12.8%). This was a bit surprising, because there were no overt signs of poverty in the areas I visited.

Richmond, I learned, is the site of the very first street trolley in the world, dating back to 1888, so I thought it appropriate (and even a requirement considering my "firsts" list) to take a tour on the trolley bus. Having become somewhat of an expert on trolley tours (my fifth, and third on this trip) I found this one to be head and shoulders above both of the others, mainly because of the tour guide. Rachel gave a lively review and a thousand facts about the history of Richmond as KP drove us around. Some of the information you'll be reading about is from her.

When Rachel found out I was cycling across the country, and planning to do the C&O/GAP, she mentioned she'd considered doing it.
"You're welcome to join me," I offered.
To my surprise, she showed some interest and we exchanged contact information.
Later, when I mentioned it to Heather, she said, "She's not going to do it because you could be a serial killer." (I thought as much since it would be astonishing for a woman to take a trip with some random guy and later, when Rachel said she wouldn't be able to make it, I wasn't terribly surprised.)
"I could be a serial killer?? What about her?" I asked. "You're so sexist."
"Statistically speaking, it's much more likely to be a man."
"Is that statistic zero for women? Because let me tell you about Aileen Wuornos, whose hotel room I just happened to have stayed in."
"No, it's not zero, but it doesn't matter. You're the serial killer."
"I dunno.... professional, Ph.D., partnered, a mom, employed.... it's the perfect cover!" Then added, "Sexist."
Heather: [heavy sigh] "You're killing me."

I think she missed out by not riding with me, but even more so, I think I missed out... Rachel is really cool and I would have enjoyed getting to know her better.

The Virginia State Capitol was designed by Thomas Jefferson while he was in France, and while he was in Nîmes, and specifically while he was around the Maison Carrée. Why do we think this? Check out a picture of the Maison Carrée.

Lewis Ginter built this hotel hoping that travelers between New York City and Florida would stop here. It was designed by the same architects (Carrère and Hastings) who designed the New York Public Library. A truncated list of people who have stayed here: thirteen United States presidents, Henry James, Charles Lindbergh, The Rolling Stones, Dolly Parton, Elvis Presley, Anthony Hopkins, and David Niven. Niven wrote in his autobiography that as he was signing the guest registry, he was shocked to see a full-sized alligator swimming in a small pool only six feet from the reception desk.

The alligators at the Jefferson became world-famous. Old Pompey, the last alligator living in the marble pools of the Jefferson's Palm Court, lived until 1948.

I'm no longer afraid of alligators now that I can do the Alligator Slide.

This is quite the classy place. It isn't just a Gentleman's Club, it's a Ladies & Gentleman's Club.

How do we know it's classy? Take a look.

I had lunch at the Secret Sandwich Society, but I can't tell you where it is because it's a closely-guarded secret.

I believe this is where Bruce Wayne lives.

This is all that’s left of Lumpkin’s Jail.

Lumpkin’s jail was also known as “The Devil’s Half Acre,” and was a mere three blocks from the state capitol building. Its final (and most notorious) owner was Robert Lumpkin, the largest slave trader in Richmond at the time. He was known for his cruelty, publicly beating or torturing anyone who tried to escape. He had a slave breeding business, and the people who were forced to breed would be forced to wear hoods in order to prevent them from knowing who they were having sex with since it could be someone they know… a niece, aunt, sister, or even a mother.

Sometimes there were so many slaves that they were literally on top of one another, crammed into one room with no toilet or outside access other than a small window. If they lived through the beatings and torture, they sometimes died of disease or starvation. However, just prior to being taken to market, the slaves were groomed, fed, and dressed up to be sold at auction, then pushed onto a boat or train to their next destination.

When reading about the history of Richmond, the 1811 fire regularly appeared.

On 26 December, 600 people (6% of the city's population) jammed themselves into the Richmond Theatre, which was built to hold no more than 500.

At the end of the first act a lit chandelier (which, at that time, used candles) was mistakenly raised, causing the backdrops and roof to catch fire. Patrons who sat in the two levels of raised boxes had to exit down a single, narrow, winding staircase, which soon collapsed. George William Smith, who had been elected governor less than three weeks earlier, was among the people who died, along with 72 others, many of them Richmond’s wealthy elites.

Gilbert Hunt, an enslaved blacksmith, heroically rushed to the burning building and was, along with Dr. James D. McCaw, responsible for saving at least a dozen people.

The people who died were interred on the site, and the city built Monumental Church over the crypt, a structure designed by the architect Robert Mills (designer of the Washington Monument) to memorialize those who died in the fire.

At the age of 16, Barbara Johns was one of 400 students crowded into the R.R. Moton High School, a building built to hold 100. In 1951, she organized a student strike to demand a new building and the demonstration ultimately led to her being one of the five cases in the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board Of Education case which struck down “separate but equal” and led to desegregation. Barbara Johns was the only student-led case.

This is The Old Stone House, appropriately named because it's the oldest house in Richmond. It's now the home of the Poe Museum.

Poe invented the detective story, even before Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” introduced the concept of a genius detective solving a crime through logic and analysis.

Some facts about Poe:
* He was born in 1809, the same year as Lincoln and Darwin.
* His mother, brother, and wife all died at the age of twenty-four.
* He moved to Charlottesville to attend the University of Virginia (started one year earlier by Thomas Jefferson), but only had $110 of the $350 he needed for tuition. Therefore, he did the only logical thing to a college student: he gambled it. Upon losing that, as well an additional $2000 ($60,000-$75,000 in today’s money), he retreated back to Richmond.
* Upon returning, he found that after those few weeks his fiancé and childhood sweetheart was engaged to another man because her father had intercepted his letters.
* He ended up marrying his 13-year-old cousin.
* He died in 1849, and his cause of death was never determined. One writer noted that because he died wearing someone else’s clothing, his death resulted from complications secondary to a beating he received during “cooping.”

Richmond is the only city in the country with Class 3 rapids.

Sam Beam of Iron & Wine, Steve West from Pavement, and Stefan Lessard of the Dave Matthew’s band attended Virginia Commonwealth University.

I found Elizabeth Von Lew to be an interesting character. She formed a spy ring during the Civil War, initially attending to wounded Union soldiers by bringing them food, clothing, writing utensils, cash to bribe the Confederates, and, more importantly, assistance in escaping and the location of safe houses after they did. She helped get a Union sympathizer appointed to the prison staff. Recently captured prisoners gave Van Lew information on Confederate troop levels and movements, which she passed on to Union commanders. There were rumors about her enslaved maid using an alias and being hired out as a servant in Jefferson Davis’ home, which provided ample information.

Van Lew developed a cipher system and often smuggled messages out of Richmond in hollow eggs. Her spy network was so efficient that on several occasions she sent General Ulysses S. Grant fresh flowers from her garden and a copy of the Richmond newspaper.

The spy ring was so successful that she was recruited to work for the US government and became an official agent of the Union. I say "work for the government," but it didn't involve any pay and, consequently, she burned through her family's fortune gathering intelligence and aiding the Union.

Van Lew was the first person to fly the United States flag after the Confederacy surrendered.

After the war, General Grant appointed her Postmaster General of Richmond where she remained for eight years until President Hayes replaced her. During that time she hired previously enslaved people and paid them the same wages as white employees.

In the years after the war's end she was severely ostracized, and was seen locally as a traitor even into the 20th century. Because she had so little money after spending it during the war she tried, unsuccessfully, to get reimbursed by the federal government. Attempts to secure a government pension also failed, and ultimately she was given money by the friends and family of one of the prisoners she helped while in prison.

Although her house is not longer standing I did take this picture.

If you recall from my earlier posts, when I get to a town where something was developed or invented I try it (e.g Key Lime Pie in Key West and the first Burger King in Miami). In this case, I’ll be drinking a can of beer, because Richmond is where canned beer made its debut. In January of 1935, the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company partnered with the American Can Company to produce the original 2,000 cans of beer.

The American Can Company tried in 1909 but it was unsuccessful, and had to wait until the end of Prohibition to try again. After two years of research they developed a can that wouldn’t explode when pressurized, always a good idea unless you're at a frat party, and had a special coating to prevent the fizzy beer from chemically reacting with the tin.

The response was overwhelming and within three months more than 80% of distributors were handling Krueger’s canned beer. They began eating into profits of “The Big Three” national breweries (Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, and Schlitz) who soon began selling their own canned beer. Because, unlike bottles, cans didn’t need a deposit, are easier to stack, cool faster, and are more durable, more than 200 million cans were sold by the end of 1935.... that's the first year. However, sales really exploded, so so speak, during WW2 when brewers shipped millions of cans to soldiers oversees.

Since Krueger was the first to sell canned beer I looked them up to see if I could still get one, but it’s no longer available. They struggled to compete with the larger, cost-efficient national breweries, and in 1961 the Narragansett Brewing Company bought them out , then closed the Newark brewery. In an attempt to maintain some continuity with the defunct beer, I researched whether Narragansett beer is still available and, fortunately, it is.

My next hurdle, a tough one at that, is to determine which of the Narragansett beers I should drink. I did my due diligence and researched what's available, and found that Narragansett appears to have more beers than the average IQ of someone in Mensa. To name a partial list:
Narragansett Lager - High on my list because it’s their flagship beer. I'll bet it tastes like beer.
Narragansett Light - No way. If you recall from my trip to The Last Resort, ordering this could reflect on my manhood, thus I’ll only drink light beer when no one is looking.
Narragansett Del’s Watermelon Shandy - This unholy marriage of beer and watermelon should be relegated to the depths of hell.
Narragansett Pumpkin Ale - Again, pumpkin and beer: unholy of unholies
Narragansett Lovecraft Series - As an avid reader of science fiction, these are intriguing and currently my first choice. They have two: “I Am Providence Imperial Red Ale” - Narragansett began in Providence, and the beer’s name derives from a poignant phrase Lovecraft used in a personal letter—"I am Providence"—which was later inscribed on his gravestone in 1977. “Innsmouth Olde Ale” - This a tribute to H.P. Lovecraft's novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Unfortunately, the Lovecraft series are limited release and therefore unavailable.
Narragansett Autocrat Coffee Milk Stout - No thanks. There’s currently too much of one of these four ingredients going around for me to stomach.
Narragansett Fest Märzen Lager - This has strong potential because I have no idea what Märzen is, but it sounds impressive
Narragansett Shandy - Having been raised in Texas, where in some counties you have to fail a sobriety test to get a driver's license, I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I don’t like beer that much, preferring a good cabernet instead. I do, on a hot day, certainly enjoy a Shandy, but upon reflection it’s mainly because it tastes less like beer than any other beer. So, the shandy is a strong contender… but is it really beer if it has lemonade in it, and is it representative of a Krueger?

Having done extensive research on everything but the tasting, I was finally ready to have that beer.

You would think that in a college town it would be easy to find just about any kind of beer, but no. I even turned to the "Beer Finder" on Narragansett's website, but still confronted some obstacles. The first two places on their list, a grocery store and a bar, are no longer on google maps, and several of the other places I asked had no idea what I was talking about.

No worries. I'm going after this beer as if I were Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia demanding that glass of lemonade after his trek through the desert. It took more than 45 minutes of zipping around town before finally finding one at The Brave Captain, a bar not quite up to the high standards of The Last Resort, in which three men were salivating over Salma Hayek in Tarantino's Dusk to Dawn while throwing back shots.

During the trolley tour, Rachel taught us some interesting information about the Arthur Ashe statue. It's positioned along Monument Avenue, and is currently the only statue on this nominal street since the others were of Confederate sympathizers and have been removed.

Ashe has always been one of my heroes, and I used his goofy-looking tennis racket when I played in high school. The reason I like this statue so much is twofold:
1. He's holding a racket and books, but the books are being held higher than the racket. He specifically asked it to be sculpted this way to express that education is more important than sports. As a former librarian, this makes my heart sing.
2. He asked the artist to sculpt him as an older man, and with the evidence of the HIV he contracted from a tainted transfusion, instead of as a young man in his prime. The reason, he stated, was that he wanted his legacy to reflect the totality of his life - not just his achievements on the tennis court, but also his work as an activist, educator, and humanitarian. He claimed that greatness isn’t just about winning - it’s about how you live, who you help, and what you stand for. I wasn't able to get a good picture from the tour bus, but you can google an image of it to see.

I put my bike together this evening and was surprised to find it remained intact after the beating it took. When I picked it up the box was falling apart, partly from the TSA Inspectors and partly from the baggage handlers. After reassembling it, I took it for a test ride and somehow, absolutely without my foreknowledge or guidance, found myself at The Sweet Spot. It appears the bike is working.

My dinner this evening. You thought I was kidding when I said the 10-pound weight loss greenlighted the Ben & Jerry's?

Things I wanted to see, but didn’t have the time:
1. The American Civil War Museum - While J. E. B. Stuart's boots and John Wilkes Booth’s hair don’t hold any real interest for me, I did want to see the “Rosette Bullet,” formed from two colliding bullets from opposing sides. That's like something out of an old Western, or a sci-fi movie. The building in which it's housed, the Tredeger Iron Foundry, is beautiful, and one of the few structures that wasn’t burned by the Confederate troops as they were retreating (because Joseph Anderson, the owner and manager, hired people with guns to protect it).

I did get a picture of it the building it's in, which is stately and beautiful, but I think it would look even more stately and historic if the word "HISTORIC" wasn't plastered across the front.

2. The Bicycle Tree - Dozens of bicycles, painted silver, are welded into a pyramid that’s about 20 feet high. Unsurprisingly, I like bikes.
3. The Markel Building - This building looks like a baked potato but is too far out of the way, so I decided I’ll just buy a baked potato and look at it instead.
4. Agecroft Hall - This was built in the late 1400s and transported from England but, again, too far out of the way. I guess I’ll just buy another baked potato.
5. I would loved to have see the Highland Games & Celtic Festival, but unfortunately it only lasted from 2003-2009. Who wouldn’t want to watch an endurance test where contestants put ferrets down their pants and see who can last the longest. I would expect there to be a significant amount of alcohol involved (I’m referring to alcohol for the ferrets because without it, it would otherwise be animal cruelty to put them into a man’s pants).

Overall, I found Richmond to be a great town. I had planned to stay longer, but missed my connection in Chicago and had to spend the night there and arrived here later than anticipated. I hope to return when I have more time.

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Suzanne GibsonMärzen (German: [ˈmɛʁt͡sn̩] ⓘ) or Märzenbier (German: March beer) is a lager that originated in Bavaria, Germany. It has a medium to full body and may vary in colour from pale through amber to dark brown.[1] It was the beer traditionally served at the Munich Oktoberfest.[2][3] The geographical indication Oktoberfestbier is protected in the EU and can only be used for Märzen that is brewed in Munich.[4][5]
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2 days ago

Mark BinghamTo Suzanne GibsonIt's really nice to have my own personal research assistant. :-)
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1 day ago

Laura SeiditaGlad you had a good vacation from your vacation - and glad to have to back on the road for my vicarious pleasure!
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1 day ago