Monument Avenue

Monument Avenue Historic District shares the distinction with Jackson Ward of being one of only two National Historic Landmark districts within the City of Richmond, Virginia. Monument Avenue is the nation’s only grand residential boulevard with monuments of its scale surviving almost unaltered to the present day. The district is nationally significant for its architecture and as an example of city planning. A broad residential tree-lined street extending for some five miles from inner city Richmond westward into Henrico County, the avenue takes its name from the series of monumental statues that mark its major intersections, generally in the center of traffic circles. For many years, the street was Richmond’s ceremonial parade route. Included among those who have journeyed to the Governor’s Mansion along “The Avenue” are Marshall Foch, Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd, Winston Churchill, General Eisenhower, and Queen Elizabeth. The district contains some of the city’s finest residences and continues to be a fashionable neighborhood for Richmond’s elite. The earliest proposal for creating a broad avenue in Richmond to honor Confederate heroes appears on an 1888 plat showing the subdivision of the Allen Estate west of the present intersection of Franklin and Lombardy Streets. The 1890 unveiling of Jean Antoine Mercie’s great equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee revealed the first major element on this unique memorial street. Afterward, Monument Avenue seemed the logical place to erect more statues to Civil War heroes. The Lee Monument is the largest and grandest of the statues on Monument Avenue, with a 12-ton, 21’ high bronze statue sitting on a 40’ high granite pedestal designed by French architect Paul Pujot. No houses appeared on the avenue before 1903, but in 1906 Richmond’s City Council approved the extension of the avenue west to Boulevard from its original terminus at Allison Street. As soon as Monument Avenue’s traffic lanes began to be paved with their distinctive asphalt paving blocks in 1907, the street came to be one of the most fashionable places to live in Richmond. Unveiled in May 1907, the equestrian monument to James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart, by local sculptor Frederick Moynihan, is at Monument Avenue and Lombardy Street. The statue is located in the center of Stuart Circle. June of 1907 saw the erection of the Jefferson Davis Monument at the intersection of Monument and Davis Avenues. Designed by Richmond architect William C. Noland and sculptor Edward V. Valentine, it features 13 Doric columns representing the 11 southern states that seceded from the Union plus the two states that sent delegates to the Confederate Congress. In October 1919, the Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson statue was unveiled at Monument Avenue and the Boulevard. F. William Sievers designed it as well as the Matthew Fontaine Maury Monument at Monument Avenue and Belmont Street, made public on Armistice Day, November 11, 1929. The sixth and last statue, the Arthur Ashe statue, stands at the intersection of Monument Avenue and Roseneath Road on the last block of the historic district. The dedication in 1996 of this monument to Richmond’s native humanitarian, scholar, and athlete on Ashe’s birthday, July 10, drew thousands of spectators.