Manchester: Richmond's Rival Across the James

Standing on the south bank of the James River, directly opposite the capital of Virginia, Manchester spent more than a century insisting that it was a separate city and not simply Richmond's shadow.

The area began as Rocky Ridge, below the falls of the James, where tobacco rolled down to river wharves. In seventeen sixty-nine the Virginia General Assembly incorporated it as the town of Manchester, and it grew quickly into a working port. For most of the eighteenth century it served as a formal port of entry, a busy port that shipped tobacco and coal, and that was also a landing point for slave ships.

The rivalry with Richmond was geographic and temperamental. Richmond sat on the north bank, the seat of colonial and then state government, a city of courts and merchants. Manchester was the industrial bank, home to flour mills, ironworks, and warehouses. The two communities stared at each other across the river for more than a hundred years.

Manchester became an independent city in its own right in eighteen seventy-four, with its own mayor and municipal services. But its independence was short-lived. By nineteen ten, Richmond had grown hungry enough to annex the south bank entirely, absorbing Manchester as Washington Ward. A city that had defied Richmond for a hundred and forty years was folded into it by agreement between the two cities after decades of talks.

Today the neighborhood is known as Old Town Manchester. Its nineteenth-century industrial buildings, many converted to apartments and studios, overlook the river and the skyline of the city that eventually swallowed it.