Fairmont Historic District

Fairmount is a residential neighborhood on a nearly level hilltop in Richmond, Virginia, spanning about ten blocks by seven. More than half of its parcels hold frame houses built between 1890 and about 1900, and most of the rest date from 1915 to 1925. The typical house is a two-story, three-bay frame town house with a shed roof, set only a few feet from its neighbors, with either a false mansard roof in Queen Anne style or an Italianate bracketed cornice. Because identical or nearly identical designs were built in groups, whole blocks read as continuous street walls. Later blocks hold rows of Craftsman and Classical Revival bungalows. Four churches anchor Fairmount Avenue, and Fairmount School stands at the center of the district. The district includes 542 contributing and 172 non-contributing buildings. Its significance lies chiefly in architecture: the repeated forms, surviving wooden ornament, and consistent urban character, rather than in any single high-style building.