I passed through Richmond on the highway dozens of times over the years since it was on the direct route between my family's home in New York and my college in North Carolina, but it never occurred to me in my younger days to stop there and look around. We did in fact stop once in Richmond on a family trip to Florida in 1983, but that was only to go to the emergency room because my mother was having a migraine headache.

Richmond was capital of the Confederate States of America for most of its short history and is one of South’s most historic cities . Why would you choose to move the capital of a new country from Montgomery deep in its heart to a city so close to the border? Back at the time of the Civil War Richmond was one of the two biggest cities in the South, along with New Orleans. The South’s really big boomtowns since the mid-20^th century – Charlotte, Nashville, and even Atlanta were not all that significant 150 years ago. Richmond was still important enough in 1913 to have been made headquarters of one of the Federal Reserve system’s twelve regional banks.

There’s a huge contrast between Richmond and Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina 150 miles to the southwest is huge. While the Raleigh area has been growing by leaps and bounds with huge suburban office parks, miles of new McMansions, and much new downtown high rise construction, most of what you see in Richmond is quite old by American standards. Richmond has dense urban neighborhoods of handsome brick houses from the eras before automobiles and when garages opened to back allies rather than streets. The front yards in Richmond are generally small but not taken up mostly by driveway concrete.

The modern office buildings in downtown Richmond are now all quite dated looking too. When I told my brother I was going to Richmond he made the comment that there hasn’t been a new downtown office building built since Ronald Reagan was still present. A look around from the 17^th floor observation deck of the city hall building suggests that’s not entirely true . There are currently two new downtown buildings under construction, although I don’t know how tall they will be and suspect one part of a hospital complex.

Richmond appears to be a great place to live if you want to have a nice old house in an in-town neighborhood. Although I haven’t checked out prices, the large stock of older homes in nice urban neighborhoods and relative lack of growth in area compared to bigger cities suggest it should be possible to get a nice house in the city at a far more affordable price than in hipper towns. Even the lofts along river are truly in converted old warehouses and industrial buildings rather than modern construction built to meet demand for that kind of living.

I spent a beautiful sunny day mostly around the center of the city. Monument Avenue is a broad boulevard laid out in the early 1900s west of downtown with a wide center median that’s lined with beautiful houses and has a monument to a Confederate leader at every 3^rd or 4^th intersection . Since the city has had an African-American majority for a while, one that’s been able to vote for the half century since the Civil Rights Movement, it seem only fitting that a monument to native son tennis player Arthur Ashe has recently been added to the long line of white guys on horses.

The Virginia State Capitol building was designed by Thomas Jefferson in the form of Greek Temple, modeled on the Maison Carree in Nimes, France. Two wings were added to Jefferson’s original building in the early 1900s to accommodate more modern Senate and House Chambers, while the original parts serve as a museum. The Capitol Square Park surrounding the building includes the Executive Mansion where the governor resides and numerous statues of famous Virginians, the most prominent of whom is George Washington. Overall I think it’s one of the most beautiful state capitol grounds in the U.S.

As well as touring the Capitol I also managed to fit in a short tour of the public areas of the Executive Mansion. I couldn’t help thinking about what dirty dealings might have taken place fairly recently in the rooms I was wandering through. The corruption scandal and trial of former Governor Bob McDonnell (who left office in January of this year) and his wife became national news. The guilty verdict in their trial came only a month and half ago. Virginia may be pretty, but it’s corruption nowadays starts right at the top!

Even if you think you’ve researched a place well before you visit and planned it all out, I find it’s still sometimes useful to go to the tourist office . Richmond’s is in the bell tower on the Capitol Park grounds. The overly helpful lady recommended a list of historical sites I wasn’t aware of that I should visit, far too many for me to make it to in one day, and mapped out a route for me. "OK, honey, this is what you oughtta do…….” I would probably also not have found out the city hall observation deck without her help.

Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church near the Capitol is where Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee (when he wasn’t on the battlefield) attended church during the Civil War; the so-called Lee House is where Lee lived for a while in the years after the Confederate surrender; the White House of the Confederacy (now part of the Museum of the Confederacy) is where Jefferson Davis lived while serving as president of the breakaway nation.

Saint John’s Episcopal Church is where the second Virginia Convention met in 1775 and Patrick Henry made his famous "Give me Liberty or give me Death!” speech . I prefer to call it the “Give me Liberty or give me Death but give me Slaves!” speech since Henry was a slaveholder. Many of the American Founding Fathers from the southern colonies/states were slave owners, but many wrote about their issues with the morality of the institution, freed their slaves in their will, or in Monroe’s case made it a point not to break up slave families. To my knowledge Patrick Henry is not on record as having expressed any such regrets.

One interesting Richmond site and unit of the National Park System is the home of Maggie Walker, an African-American woman who became very successful in business in the early 1900s, established a bank, and became the first Black woman to be president of a banking institution in the U.S. in the era before women’s suffrage, civil rights, and even limitations on women owning property. I allotted a full day to historic Richmond but still feel like I barely scratched the surface of what there is to see.