A postcard of the General A.P. Hill monument  by VCU Libraries Commons licensed under Creative Commons.

This was one of GGWash’s most popular articles in 2020. We’re sharing some of our hits again over the holiday season.

Public calls for Confederate statues to be removed from Richmond’s streetscape are not a new occurrence in Virginia’s capital; however, the focus of Northside residents’ most recent campaign to move one monument is not racism—but safety.

After decades of crashes and the General Assembly’s recent decision to give localities control over Confederate memorials, 2020 could be the year General A. P. Hill stops causing car collisions.

Who put that there?

The Commonwealth, like most states in the US, has never reckoned with its long, dark history of slavery, segregation, and prejudice. The birthplace of Massive Resistance is only just beginning to come to terms with its traumatic treatment of Black Americans over the centuries, and Virginia’s 223 public spaces proudly displaying Confederate monuments have quickly become the frontline of this fight.

Most of Richmond’s Confederate memorials are located along the aptly named Monument Avenue, but Confederate commander Robert E. Lee’s “Forgotten General” oddly found his final resting place in the middle of one of the city’s busiest intersections.

In 1892, Richmond developer Lewis Ginter leveraged the vanity of Hill’s daughter to make a tomb to the general the crowning amenity of his latest streetcar suburb. After exhuming Hill’s remains from Hollywood Cemetery, in a public ceremony Ginter interred the corpse standing fully upright beneath a pedestal and statue combo towering three-stories tall at the intersection of Hermitage Road and Laburnum Avenue.

What began as a sweeping roundabout is today little more than an overlarge traffic hazard thanks to engineers’ last attempts to improve the safety of the intersection back in 1970. Describing the junction’s redesign, the Richmond Times-Dispatch proclaimed: “The City has accomplished what Federal troops failed to do during the Civil War: take the ground held by General A.P. Hill. However, the City had an advantage—with modern excavation equipment it has scooped 6 feet from all sides of the Hill Monument.”

Confederate chaos

This spring, Northside resident Tara FitzPatrick hopes to put an end to the crashes. As the Safe Routes to Schools Coordinator for Greater Richmond’s Fit 4 Kids, she is working with the Parent Teacher Association at Linwood Holton Elementary to rally the community behind removing the statue.

Named after the former Virginia Governor most famous for sending his white children to an integrated school, one might assume parents’ top cause for concern would be the inherent racism of the monument. Instead their leading argument is safety.

“Anybody who has even driven through that intersection can tell how treacherous it is. It’s a terrible idea to have a large statue in the middle of a dangerously designed intersection,” said FitzPatrick.

The City’s own statistics lend credence to her claims. Last year alone 43 crashes were logged at that one intersection. Friends of FitzPatrick who live nearby have become so used to the sound of cars colliding here that they barely notice them anymore.

Crash data generated from TREDS.

Others who frequent the area would rather not become so accustomed to the carnage. FitzPatrick avoids that intersection as much as she possibly can.

“Even as a parent with a child at that school, I don’t use that intersection,” FitzPatrick said. “When I’m in the median there I can’t see due to the statue. It’s incredibly poorly designed.”

“They actually put mid-block crosswalks halfway down the street because no one wants to cross at that intersection.”

To help kids and parents alike traverse this perilous patch of road this year, Fit 4 Kids worked with Richmond Public Schools to up the number of crossing guards they have stationed at Holton Elementary to three. Normally Holton wouldn’t warrant such a show of force, but due to its location at one of Richmond’s most dangerous intersections, RPS made an exception and found the funding for the additional guards.

Despite our current state of social distancing, FitzPatrick plans to organize a community walkabout via their Facebook page later this month. Those who live around, go to school near, or just drive through this intersection are all encouraged to participate in the exercise to highlight unsafe spaces around Holton Elementary.

No one doubts that participants will likely identify the A. P. Hill statue as the area’s greatest hazard. The bigger question is what to do then.

“I would like to see a major design change. I want to see the monument go away completely because it blocks people’s visibility,” said FitzPatrick. “Right now we have a confusing combination of a traffic circle and a stoplight. For people walking or biking it’s even worse because it’s so hard to pay attention to traffic coming from all directions. Honestly, it’s a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’ another fatality is going to happen at that intersection.”

The general’s last stand

Beyond the debate between restoring the roundabout or modifying the current design, one question looms large over FitzPatrick’s campaign to alter the intersection: where would A. P. Hill’s remains go?

In 1966, city planners hoped Northside residents would approve of allowing the general to join his fellow Confederates along Monument Avenue, specifically at its junction with Allison Street. After the Richmond Civil War Roundtable—a “heritage, not hate” group—sent a defiant letter to the Mayor and members of City Council, however, the idea was soon dropped.

Theoretically the General could return to his last resting place: Hollywood Cemetery, buried alongside Confederate president Jefferson Davis and 28 other Southern generals. That is if the private cemetery would take him. Hill’s remains last laid in rest here 128 years ago.

The one place the statue seems welcome is out in Dinwiddie County at the site of Hill’s death. Not knowing General Lee’s lines had already been broken, in the final days of the Civil War Hill rode into battle against a party of Union soldiers advancing on Petersburg and was shot and killed. Today a historic marker just up the road from Dirty Joe’s Coin Laundry denotes the location of his death.

Just 400 feet away the local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans erected their own shrine. Although the group indicated their interest in having Hill’s statue and remains moved here, no official discussions have yet to take place.

Before the general could go anywhere, however, City Council must vote in favor of his removal. Within Richmond, 9th District City Councilmember Dr. Mike Jones has led the charge to remove racist statues.

This winter Jones won the latest vote requesting local control over such monuments from the General Assembly 6-2. Now that Confederates’ removal has become a very real possibility, no one is sure how the discussion around reckoning with Richmond’s dark past will move forward.

Update: The statue was the lone city-managed monument (Lee is state-owned) that has not yet been removed due to the need for a court order since his removal would entail the relocation of his remains. So far the city still hasn’t filed a petition with the court. Other statues are already removed and being betrothed to certain museums, endowments, etc.

Wyatt Gordon is the senior policy manager for land use and transportation at the Virginia Conservation Network, and an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Urban Planning. He's a born-and-raised Richmonder with a master's in Urban Planning from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and a bachelor's in International Political Economy from American University.