In the Jim Crow era of separate and unequal laws, a man like John Coleman was supposed to know his place.
Around Ashland, that was Berkleytown.
The small Black community in Hanover County was just outside the Ashland limits, where the town’s segregation ordinance didn’t apply. Passed in 1911, the measure prohibited anyone from moving onto a block where a different race was in the majority.
The pattern was common in Virginia, said Blake McDonald, an architectural historian at the state Department of Historic Resources.
“Ashland did something that a lot of towns and cities in Virginia were doing at the time – introducing housing policies that made it almost impossible for Blacks to own property in the white part of town,” McDonald said.
“What makes Berkleytown special is that it is an intact early- to mid-20th-century African American community that was developed in direct relation to segregationist housing policy in the town of Ashland.”
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Though long overlooked, such communities are now getting consideration for landmark status in recognition of their importance to Virginia history. Ashland has received a state grant to start the process for Berkleytown, which is now within the town limits north of Randolph-Macon College.
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The 60-acre area called Berkleytown began to develop after the estate of Edward Berkeley subdivided seven lots on a country road just north of Ashland in 1894. The earliest homes on Berkley Street were constructed by white residents, but by the 1920s, the area was predominantly Black.
Coleman was a Black entrepreneur who would make his mark in Berkleytown, but first he tried in Ashland.
Shortly after the town's segregation ordinance passed, he bought a rental property near relatives in Ashland. When Coleman decided to live there a year later, he was fined $20 for violating the ordinance. He sued the town, took the case to the Virginia Court of Appeals and lost in 1915. (Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court declared such ordinances unconstitutional in a case from Louisville, Ky.)
By that time, Coleman apparently had decided to return to Berkleytown, according to Meriwether Gilmore, whose 2019 master's thesis at the University of Richmond explored the segregation ordinance.
Around 1918, Coleman built a simplified Queen Anne-style Sears Roebuck house on Berkley Street – a home where later resident Virginia Shelton would live to be 108 years old. In the 1920s, Coleman built a hotel on Henry Street for Black customers, among other business interests he developed.
The house and former hotel are two of the anchoring buildings for the potential Berkleytown historic district. So is the former John M. Gandy High School, built in 1950 and now home to the Hanover school administration offices.
Dovetail Cultural Resource Group in Fredericksburg is preparing a preliminary information form for the historic district application process, using a $3,500 grant awarded to Ashland by the state DHR.
Berkleytown is eligible as a historic district because it is tied to important trends in community planning and design, according to a DHR architectural survey form completed in October 2020.
"This community emerged in the 1910s and 1920s as an acceptable area for African American residents,” the form says. Barred from living in Ashland's downtown core, they built a community on land immediately adjacent to town – "thus ironically allowing them to continue to work in the same area where they were barred from living.”
The more detailed nomination for the National Register of Historical Places could follow the initial research phase.
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Carolyn Hemphill, founder of the Hanover County Black Heritage Society, grew up in Ashland during segregation and remembers going to Berkleytown for school.
“The irony with me,” she said, is that “I grew up on Hanover Avenue, two blocks from Henry Clay Elementary School. I had to pass the white school to get to Gandy. ... That was the beginning of my awareness of segregation."
Hemphill vividly remembers the secondhand books – some torn – that came from the white school and were used by Gandy students. Still, Gandy was part of the Black community's beating heart, in Berkleytown and beyond.
“That school covered all of Hanover County," she said. "Everybody who was Black had a mother, father, brother, sister, aunt, uncle who went to that school. It was a focal point.”
If the books were sometimes in tatters, so was the predecessor to Gandy.
Before the school was built in 1950 – with central heat and indoor plumbing – Black students came to the site to attend the Hanover Training School. Its collection of buildings included a hand-me-down elementary school that was rebuilt at the Berkleytown location when white students got a new brick building.
“One of the buildings I had classes in, the boys would have to go to the basement and get coal for the stove," said NaChay Grimes, 80. “When you’re not used to anything else, you don’t realize how different things could be.
"Then you start to hearing things," Grimes said. "Some people in the neighborhood started a movement to get us to have the same books and facilities that other schools did. It took quite awhile.”
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Beyond education, Berkleytown was a business center for Black residents. It had a funeral home, a bakery, a barbershop and a beautician. John Coleman's hotel building became an Elks Lodge and remained a place for social gatherings. A Masonic lodge met nearby.
“It was the community for middle-class blacks, business owners, teachers, people who worked for the railroad,” Tonia Burruss said.
Burruss, 57, an adult education instructor, said she started school in the first officially integrated classes at Gandy. Her worldview was broadened because her father did business with people all over Hanover, but her home community was still close-knit.
Burruss’ sister built a house in Berkleytown when her first child was born.
“She raised all her girls there,” Burruss said. “She said, ‘I want to be close to Granny’s house. … I want my daughters to have the same upbringing I had.' Everybody would watch your kids, and it was safe.”
Grimes still lives on Henry Street, a block from the home where her family moved when she was 5 years old.
“We had a core of families that were closely knit,” Grimes said. “Everybody looked out for each other. I didn’t necessarily appreciate that as a child. ... You knew that the neighbors’ eyes were on you ... It felt very safe. I could go to just about any of the houses and ask for what I needed.”
In high school, Grimes got a job at Lightfoot bakery.
“I would go there at 6 a.m. and pack pastries for deliveries to the drug store, the truck stop. I would work there until 7:30 and then run across the street to get ready for school," Grimes said.
“The first month I was there, I would nearly eat myself to death. After a while, you see it so much that you don’t even want it. I liked the eclairs – and unfortunately, I still like them!”
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Ashley Ricks grew up on Henry and B streets in Berkleytown and still lives in Ashland. He said his childhood was like “Leave It to Beaver,” a popular sitcom in the late 1950s.
“It was a small town, not anything that I thought of as being so remarkable," he said.
Ricks, a retired educator from public schools and Reynolds Community College, said almost all of the households in Berkleytown were two-parent homes of working-class families.
“It was just life as it was," he said, with segregation being part of it.
For the most part, Ricks said, “people lived in harmony with each other. There was very little other than work things where Blacks and whites intermingled with each other.
"I did see what I would look at now as police brutality. Then it was just normal. Like when they arrested somebody on the street, a Black guy had too much to drink and they beat him like a Rodney King thing. You lived in that kind of fear.
“I learned a lot from the negative things," Ricks said, "but I don’t like to dwell on them. ... There were a lot of positive things in my life."
His cousin, Roslyn de Cordova, 74, remembers one such tradition from living across the street from her great-grandmother: walking the unpaved roads to Easter egg hunts at a neighbor’s house.
A retired teacher, she also recalls her parents stressing education. "In the summer, we had a schedule to read and to play," said de Cordova, who now lives in Henrico County.
“It was all family here,” recalled Emily Lee, 74, who grew up and still lives on a family tract at the corner of Berkley and School streets. Her ranch house has a view of the lot where her grandparents once lived.
“It started changing after I was in high school,” she said.
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Over the years, the early Berkleytown owners added rooms and further modernized homes that may have started out with simple cinderblock construction. Exteriors may have been covered with siding or stucco. New homes sprung up where land was available.
In 1977, Berkleytown formally became part of Ashland in an annexation that expanded the town from about 1 square mile to about 4. Dirt roads on A and B streets were paved. Water and sewer services were added.
As opportunities opened elsewhere, children of longtime Berkleytown residents dispersed. Descendants of the older generation often sold or rented out the homes they inherited. Apartments began to cater to Randolph-Macon students.
But enough original fabric remains to tell the story of a community that offered support and opportunity in spite of oppression.
Ajena Rogers, supervisory park ranger at the Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site in downtown Richmond, lives in Ashland. She sees parallels to the Black neighborhood where she grew up in Roanoke and the historically Black neighborhood of Jackson Ward where she works.
“There are unintended consequences with integration,” she said. “You as a community gained the right to be treated with dignity, as you should have been all along. What happens is, the tightness of the community erodes.
“It’s a consequence of being able to spread out, to go where you want to go, to take your business wherever you want it," Rogers said. "You still have that pride in the neighbors who brought you up, the businesses they established. By now, 40 to 50 years later, it’s a remnant of what it was, a memory of what used to be.”
No one would advocate for returning to the restrictions that created Berkleytown and similar communities, she said, but “there’s sort of a sadness for the good things that were there that were lost. That’s why it’s really important to preserve what was there so it doesn’t get lost completely.”
Burruss, the adult education instructor, agrees. The potential designation as a historic district would honor the perseverance and legacy of those who built and nurtured Berkleytown.
“I’m proud that they’re considering to make it a historic area," Burruss said, "because our younger people don’t know. They need to know.”