Woodland Heights: One Neighborhood's Pursuit of Historic Designation

Say you live in an historic area and you and your neighbors would like to have it placed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places. Would your neighborhood be a candidate? Just how do you go about it? What kinds of evidence do you have to collect? Who do you submit your finished request to, and finally why would you want to do it anyway? If you've thought of such questions, this short essay might be of help to you.

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To answer the last question first, when a locale is placed on the Register it encourages preservation by allowing districts to apply for grants and for individual homeowners to apply for tax credits for renovation work. So the financial incentive alone is worth pursuing. But above that, an historic designation also recognizes an area's cultural importance outside its immediate area, which is good for the community and beyond.

Several residents of Richmond, Virginia's, Woodland Heights area began thinking of seeking historic status for their area in the 1990s. After more than a decade of work by a host of resident volunteers the plan finally reached fruition and was approved in the summer of 2009. (Click here to see the final document).

First surveyed in 1853, Woodland Heights is a turn-of-the-twentieth-century neighborhood in Richmond. It's about eighty square blocks and is one of the earliest planned "streetcar suburbs." The plat for the planned neighborhood was first published around 1889. The neighborhood is predominantly residential in character with two church buildings, one school, and a one-block stretch of small commercial buildings. The architectural character of the area is like the nationally popular residential styles of the period in which it was built. The most common styles are Victorian Queen Anne, Folk Victorian, Colonial Revival, and Bungalow/Craftsman.

The initiative to seek historic status was started in the early 1990s by a group of some thirty residents. Communicating regularly by email, a monthly newsletter and other less formal ways, the group did systematic house-by-house study of the area, which included an in-depth description of its buildings. In the end the nomination contained some 800 architectural descriptions.