Richmond’s Woodland Heights wins state historic designation

The Virginia Department of Historic Resources has added the Woodland Heights neighborhood of South Richmond to the Virginia Landmarks Register.

Woodland Heights was among more than two dozen new sites approved by the department after presentations last week.

Woodland Heights is an approximately 80-square-block area -- bounded roughly by the James River on the north, West 24th Street on the east, West 34th Street on the west and Bainbridge Street and Forest Hill Avenue on the south -- that is one of the oldest streetcar suburbs in Richmond.

Woodland Heights also has an application pending for designation as a federal landmark, a process that is expected to produce a decision in the coming months.

Other locations designated yesterday:

• The Ninth Street Office Building, once known as the Hotel Richmond, located near Capitol Square in downtown Richmond, was built in two phases between 1904 and 1911.

• The Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Commercial and Industrial Historic District in Petersburg, which tells the story of the city's tobacco industry from 1879 through the early 1960s when Brown & Williamson Tobacco Co. had its largest cigarette factory there.

• Goochland County's First Union School, which was built in 1926. First Union served the black community for more than 30 years before closing in 1958.

• The Hopewell High School Complex in Hopewell, which was built in 1924 in a Tudor Revival architectural style and served as the only high school in the area for a majority of the city's white population.

• Oak Grove, in eastern Goochland County, a well-maintained and evolved example of an antebellum planter's house dating to 1820.

• The Zehmer Farm in Dinwiddie County, which includes a one-story house and an impressive collection of farm buildings such as flue-cured tobacco barns, a dairy barn, milk houses and silos, as well as the sites of former tenant houses and a sawmill.

• The Bowman-Zirkle Farm in Shenandoah County, which features a well-preserved Victorian farmhouse and three earlier buildings.

• The Clem-Kagey Farm in Shenandoah County, which also features a late Victorian-era farmhouse.

• Crab Run Lane Truss Bridge near McDowell in Highland County, erected in 1896.

Also approved were Hylton Hall in Danville; Whittaker Memorial Hospital in Newport News; Fort Mitchell Depot in Lunenburg County; Galts Mill Complex in Amherst County; Lexington Site near Lorton in Fairfax County; the Orlean Historic District in Fauquier County; Rock Hill Farm in Loudoun County; the South East Street Historic District in Culpeper; Woodside in Fauquier County; the Anderson-Doosing Farm in Roanoke County's Catawba Valley; the Buena Vista Downtown Historic District in Rockbridge County; Liberty Hall in Bedford County; the Valley Railroad Bridge in Salem; the American Cigar Co. in Norfolk; the Simon Reid Curtis House in Newport News; the Eastville Historic District, which recognizes Northampton County's seat of government; Providence Plantation in King and Queen County; and the Warden Family Home in Chesapeake.

-- Joe Macenka