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Richmond's Sherwood Park neighborhood is an attractive, diverse community, nestled in the heart of the city's Northside suburbs. The winding, tree-lined Brookland Parkway runs diagonally from Brook Road to Hermitage Road, creating a scenic centerpiece for the neighborhood. Side streets mimic the curving contours of the parkway to create crescent-shaped blocks with yards and homes of varying sizes. Spacious front lawns, many planted with old, majestic trees, frame charming houses. Located less than three miles from Richmond's downtown, the neighborhood is surrounded by historic communities: the Ginter Park Residents Association coordinates preservation and beautification efforts for four districts immediately north and east of the neighborhood. But there is an irony: despite being designed in part by Frederick Law Olmsted, the most celebrated landscape architect in the nation's history, Sherwood Park is not a part of this historic preservation alliance. The lack of historical provenance for this community-the only one in Richmond and one of the very few in the South designed by Olmsted-speaks to a number of factors related to twentieth-century suburban development. White anxieties about nearby African American residents, unwelcome interference by project engineers, economic collapses, and changes in suburban development wrought by the automobile and government policy in the years after World War II all significantly affected this neighborhood's trajectory. Its relative anonymity, despite its significant origins, is a testament to the power of these forces.
In THE AFTERMATH of the Civil War, the City of Richmond needed to be rebuilt, a victim of years of war and devastating fires set by fleeing Confederate troops. As it underwent its slow return to stature as one of the Souths major cities, one of its key leaders was Lewis Ginter. A New York City orphan who moved to Richmond at age eighteen to be close to an uncle, Ginter had opened a successful dry goods business in the 1840s. When the Civil War broke out, he enlisted in the Confederate army, where he served in the commissary and rose to the rank of major. After the war, he moved to New York but returned to Richmond in 1873, when he and John F. Allen opened a tobacco factory. Pioneering innovative manufacturing practices and clever marketing and merchandising strategies, Allen & Ginter became one of the...