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it would be great to include information on Stratford Hills and the areas around cherokee road if anyone has information.
Portions of this article need to be rewritten, particularly that portion dealing with old maps, where the author has used the personal pronoun "I" to state his disagreement with the labeling of a map.
Winter Maiden (talk) 00:35, 25 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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I am moving the Old MAps section here to the talk page and deleting it from the village history section. It is kind of a digression, and it may actually be Original Research. Not saying it isn't interesting, but but honestly, I don't feel it belongs in the article itself:
By 1895, Bon Air was under development as a resort for Richmonders, located on the Southern Railway about 8 miles (13 km) west of Manchester (which agreed to merge with the City of Richmond in 1909) and 3 miles (5 km) west of Granite in Chesterfield County, Virginia
An 1864 map, noted as "Published by D. Van Nostrand, New York", and entitled Map of Richmond, Virginia and Surrounding Country appears to show a small cluster of buildings labeled "Pawhite Stop" on the "Railroad to Coal Mines" line at the site of historic Bon Air village. However, it has also been suggested that "Pawhite Stop" (which on the map is "Pawhite STA") is not Bon Air, Virginia. First, it is on what is labeled "Railroad to Coal Mines", and the Richmond and Danville line is several miles south of this. [The railroad to the coal mines was the Chesterfield Railroad which was south of and paralleled Midlothian Turnpike. Midlothian Turnpike is south of Bon Air. The island shown in the James River might be "Williams Island", but there is no actual major creek as shown on the map flowing into the river at this point. If the creek is "Powhite Creek", then the accuracy of the map is even more questionable. This noted, the small stream of Rattle Snake creek flows into the river near Williams Island and originates just to the east of the present-day Bon Air.
A much better map to examine is Survey of a part of Chesterfield County, Virginia. Made under the direction of A.H. Campbell Capt. P.E. & Ch'f Top'l Dep't. by P.W.O. Koerner Lieut. P.E. ; B.F. Blackford and C.E. Cassell Asst. Eng'rs. 1862 & 1863. (This is in the Library of Congress digital collection.) Of particular note is the area owned by "Cogbill" which is in the vicinity of the area near Buford Road near Bon Air Elementary School and Grand Summit subdivision. The "red line" east of "Cogbill" property does approximate the path of the road said to have been near Burroughs Street and crossed the tracks and continued on to Belleau Road where some suggest there was a "flag stop" for Brown's Summit which is west of this near the current (2009) Buford Road bridge over the tracks.
This map does not show a "Pawhite Station" nor any station near what is now "Bon Air, Virginia".
A map in the Virginia State Library - (Virginia Board of Public Works Record #000012006) shows the Richmond and Danville Railroad. Powhite Station is indicated on this map and based on a comparison of the track on this map and current Right of Way of Norfolk Southern Corporation Powhite Station seems to be located west of the Rockaway Road crossing and perhaps even west of Jimmy Winters Creek. Of interest on the map is a notation that Robios Station (west of Powhite Station) is 10 1/2 miles though an early R&D timetable indicates that Powhite was 11 miles.
I will try to salvage some of the content in the article, but much of it is just speculation about where Bon Air is located on old maps. Peace, MPS (talk) 15:54, 28 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
There is undue weight in this article on the Burroughs' farm (Bethany) ... It is interesting, but maybe it needs its own article in Wikipedia. I am placing it here until we figure out what to do with it.
Land for the benefit of children
Another Confederate civil war veteran came to Bon Air, and like Colonel Buford, General Logan, Polk Miller, and other contemporaries of the time, he (and his wife) were to leave a long-lasting impact upon the community, as well as their family name on a street.
East of the current city limit along Forest Hill Avenue was land which was earlier known as "The Old Burton Place" with an antebellum farmhouse. The land was described by a historian as poor for farming due to the many rocks on the site.
In 1889, the 165-acre (0.7 km2) tract (and the old farmhouse) was purchased by J.R.F. Burroughs, originally of Lynchburg, (then in Campbell County), and his wife Lucy. A childless couple, a few years later the Burroughs opened an orphanage which was originally called "The Home for Friendless Children", and was incorporated in 1898. Religiously devout, the couple never solicited for funds for the orphanage, but there are tales of the support they received anyway. When Mr. Burroughs died in 1915, he was buried at a site now surrounded by neighboring apartments, where his tombstone reads "Faithful unto Death". Burroughs Street in Bon Air was named for the couple.
After he died, the home was taken over by others, and became known as the Bethany Home. It was supported by the community, notably including Bon Air Presbyterian Church, until it closed during the 1940s. A 1936 newspaper article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch stated that over a thousand children had known the farm as "home", maintaining an average of 50 boys and girls at a time. [1]
One of the buildings of the Bethany Home survived into the second half of the twentieth century, and was long used as an adult home for the elderly and disabled. Some of the land north of modern Forest Hill Avenue was still in such use at the beginning of the twenty-first century, where a new nursing home was built in the 1980s. South of the old Granite Road, later renamed Forest Hill Avenue, Chesterfield County built a water tower on part of the property. However, beginning in 1960, children were to return to much of the rest of the land.
