Main Street Banking Historic District (Additional Documentation)

Five blocks of East Main Street in downtown Richmond, from 7th to 13th Streets, make up a historic district that has served as the city's banking center since 1817. The Evacuation Fire of 1865 destroyed nearly every antebellum building there except the 1858 Customs House, and the area was rebuilt soon afterward with Northern capital. The result is a dense group of brick, stone and cast-iron buildings. Italianate iron-front rows from the 1860s, including the Stearns Building and the Virginia Fire and Marine Insurance Company building, share the street with a Richardsonian Romanesque bank and early skyscrapers such as the nineteen-story First National Bank Building of 1912. Architects included Ammi Burnham Young, George H. Johnson, Charles H. Read and the firm Clinton & Russell. The district contains twenty-one contributing buildings, six of them already individually listed. Its significance rests on this architectural range and on its long role as Richmond's financial core, which continues today.