Valentine Richmond History Center

Valentine Richmond History Center Review

For more than 100 years, the Valentine Richmond History Center, established in 1898, has celebrated one of America's most historic cities. It has collected more than a million objects—one of the nation's largest collections focusing on a single city—including preserved photographs, textiles, and artifacts, and interprets 400 years of Richmond's history through items of everyday life. Wickham House (1812), a part of the Valentine, is more rightly a mansion; it was designed by architect Alexander Parris, the creator of Boston's Faneuil Hall. John Wickham was Richmond's wealthiest citizen of the time, and Daniel Webster and Zachary Taylor were frequent guests. The last owner of the house, Mann Valentine Jr., left a bequest in his will to turn the home into a museum. Mann's brother, sculptor Edward Valentine, worked from his carriage house studio to create the Robert E. Lee memorial at Washington & Lee University, and the famous statue of Thomas Jefferson in Richmond's grand Jefferson Hotel. His studio is one of only four surviving 19th-century sculptors' studios in the United States open to the public.