William Byrd II Draws the Grid

In early seventeen thirty-seven, a Virginia planter named William Byrd the Second commissioned a surveyor named William Mayo to draw a town grid on land above the James River's fall line. Mayo completed the work in April. Byrd named the new settlement Richmond, after the English town of Richmond near London, because the view of the river bending at the falls reminded him of the prospect from Richmond Hill over the River Thames back home.

Byrd was many things at once. He was a member of the Royal Society in London, a lawyer trained at the Middle Temple, a large slaveholder, a diarist whose private journals recorded his exploits with remarkable candor, and a man who had spent so much of his childhood in England that Virginia felt foreign to him when he returned. He served on the Virginia Governor's Council for thirty-five years.

He was also a skilled promoter. Byrd understood that the fall line was commercially decisive. Ships from the Atlantic could reach the town, and goods from the backcountry could flow down to it.

He laid out the original grid of lots with that logic in mind. The settlement was incorporated as a town in seventeen forty-two, five years after the surveyor's work was done. Byrd died in seventeen forty-four, before Richmond became the capital of Virginia in seventeen eighty and before it became anything close to the city he imagined.

But the grid he commissioned is still legible in the streets of Shockoe Bottom today.