Black Heath

The mansion of Black Heath was very large and grand and in its early days was said to have been "surrounded by all the appurtenances of a home of wealth and taste."[1] The land Black Heath was built on was near some of the first coal mining enterprises in Virginia and the Black Heath coal mine was less than 400 feet south of the house. The name "Black Heath" was derived from the color of the coal and the Heth family. A history of Midlothian written in 1983 states that the "estate, known as Black Heath, had an elegant mansion and beautiful grounds."[2] The mansion house was part brick and part frame, two stories tall, and six bays wide.[1][3] Black Heath had three types of roofs: hipped, gambrel, and gable. The Byrd family plantation house, Westover, has these three roof types as well.[3] Among the dependencies of Black Heath were a flower garden, an oak grove, a circular brick dovecote or pigeon house, stables, a barn, and other numerous outbuildings.[1]

The land on which Black Heath was built was originally part of a land grant to John Tullitt. He received a land grant for sponsoring the passage of Huguenot refugees. Tullit received 17,653 acres for importing 353 people.[4] This vast tract of land, although recorded as having 17,653 acres, actually had at least 27,500 acres based on the locations of the survey posts and lines seen from satellite imagery today.[5] When Hannah Brummall Tullitt, the widow of John Tullitt, died in 1737, she left land near Falling Creek with coal pits to her brother John's children.[6] John Brummall was the great-grandfather of Elijah Brummall, a local coal mine owner in the early 1800s and the owner of Aetna Hill, a house built in 1791 that was 0.7 miles southwest of Black Heath.

In an 1823 court case, Harry Heth and John Stewart (partners in a firm called Heth and Stewart instituted in 1786) are mentioned as having bought in 1795 a certain 99.5 acre parcel of land on which the Black-heath coal-pits lay. They paid 3,150 pounds for this land, of which 1,486 pounds, 1 shilling, and 4 pence were paid to Samuel Swann (who held the mortgage on the land) and 1,663 pounds, 18 shillings, and 8 pence to William Bentley, the administrator of William Ronald, the deceased owner of the land.[7] The Black Heath house was presumably built in the late 1790s or early 1800s by Henry "Harry" Heth, a Richmond area businessman. It is said that Heth acquired the land in the 1790s, so he most likely built his house soon after he bought the land or a couple years thereafter.[8] Harry Heth operated the Black Heath coal mine located on the property and became very wealthy as a result of the mine's productiveness. The Black Heath mine was among the nation's richest and most productive coal mines in the first quarter of the 19th century.

In early 1821, Harry Heth died of consumption in Savannah, Georgia, where he had arrived after a stay in Europe for the improvement of his health. In his will, Harry gave the Black Heath house and surface land to his eldest son, Henry. The subsurface land belonged to the co partnership consisting of Harry's three sons, Henry, John, and Beverly, and his son in law, Beverly Randolph. This partnership was set up to continue the Heth family coal business. Henry Heth was born in 1793/4 probably somewhere around Richmond. Not much is known about his life, except that he married Eliza Ann Cunliffe, the daughter of a neighboring coal mine owner named John Cunliffe (1758-1824), on January 4, 1815, in Chesterfield County, most likely at Black Heath. During the War of 1812, Henry served as a sergeant major under his father in the 1st Regiment (Heth's) Cavalry, Virginia Militia. After the war, Henry probably came to help his father in the coal business and in the 1820 US Census he is recorded as having 44 male slaves and 4 female slaves. In 1821, his father Harry died and Henry inherited the plantation Black Heath. He lived there until he also died, four years later, in 1825. His widow Eliza later married a man named Holden Rhodes.

After Henry's death, Black Heath and its land passed to John Heth, Harry's second son and Henry's younger brother. John had been a midshipman in the US Navy during the War of 1812, but resigned in 1822 to marry Margaret Pickett and take over the family coal business. John had eleven children with Margaret between 1823 and 1842, including Confederate Major General Henry Heth, who fought in the American Civil War and was born at Black Heath in 1825.[9]

In 1833 John Heth incorporated the Black Heath Company of Colliers with his brother, Beverley Heth, and brother-in-law, Beverley Randolph. This company was the first incorporated coal mining company in the state of Virginia. By 1840 John owned most of the three thousand shares of stock and went to England to advertise for a new company to English investors. This new company was formed in 1841 and was called the Chesterfield Coal and Iron Mining Company. Unfortunately, after returning from England in 1842, John Heth died at Norwood Plantation on April 30. He left his wife and 10 young children with ages varying between 19 years and one month. Major General Henry Heth, John Heth's third child and eldest son, wrote later in his life that the period after his father's death was "the most severe calamity I had ever felt." When 17-year-old Henry reported to the military academy at West Point in 1842, he described his family as "badly off" and in "reduced circumstances."[10] John Heth's widow Margaret continued living at Black Heath until she died in 1850, at which point the house was sold to A. F. D. Gifford.[11]

A. F. D. Gifford (A. F. D. is for Adolphus Frederick Danberry) was an widowed Englishman who initially came to Virginia as the attorney for the Chesterfield Coal and Iron Mining Company.[12] However, the company had declined since 1844 when a major explosion had killed 11 miners. Gifford later became the vice president of the Richmond and Danville Railroad and was involved in local politics. In 1845 he married Mary Ann Johnson, daughter of the Virginia lawyer Chapman Johnson.[13][14] They had three children between 1847 and 1853 and also took care of Mary Ann's deceased brother Carter Page Johnson's two children. In 1850 A. F. D. Gifford had 124 slaves (119 men and boys and 5 women and girls), making him a very wealthy man and in 1861 he had two slave children.[15] During the first couple years of the Civil War, Gifford traveled to England in an attempt to secure munitions for the Confederate Army. Upon his return to Virginia in January 1862, however, his ship sunk, probably while trying to run the Union blockade.[14][16] Gifford's death led to his widow, Mary Gifford, becoming dependent. She, along with many other Southern dependent women, had to apply for a job "signing and numbering Confederate notes" at the Confederate States Treasury office.[17]

With A. F. D. Gifford's death, Black Heath passed to William B. Ball (B. is for Bernard), the fifth and last owner of the estate. In the June 20, 1868 issue of the Richmond Daily Dispatch, William B. Ball is listed as the administrator of A. F. D. Gifford.[18] Ball was probably a friend of Gifford's as he was the administrator of his estate. W. B. Ball graduated from Jefferson Medical College and was a local doctor who served in the Midlothian area of Chesterfield County. At one point he was also one of three company doctors for the Midlothian Coal Mining Company. When the Civil War broke out he became a captain in Company B in the 4th Virginia Cavalry of the Confederate States Army. By 1862 he had been promoted to colonel. After the war he was a surgeon in Chesterfield County and the state commissioner of fish culture. He died on January 10, 1872 at the Exchange Hotel in Richmond.[19] His wife died 28 years later, on April 4, 1900 in Richmond. Col. William B. Ball's administrator was C. H. Flournoy (C. is for Clarence), sheriff of Chesterfield County.[20] Clarence H. Flournoy was from a prominent Huguenot Chesterfield family and was the sheriff of Chesterfield County from 1872-1880.[21]

It is unknown what happened to Black Heath after Ball died. At some point between 1870 and 1930, Black Heath fell into ruin and collapsed as a result of the coal mines tunneled under the house. The house and land were owned by the Chesterfield Coal and Iron Mining Company (successor of the Black Heath Company of Colliers), which had ceased mining operations in the area after an explosion in 1854.[22] The company "was having difficulty selling the land" perhaps because of the large tracts of coal mines sitting around.[23] This would have been an issue to any potential buyers, as nobody was mining coal anymore and open pits were obstacles to farming the land. A WPA Federal Writers' Project guidebook published in 1940 indicates that the Black Heath house was still standing, or at least some portions of it, and that it was in "dense undergrowth".[24] This same guidebook also tells that to get to the site of Black Heath, a traveler going west on US Route 60 (Midlothian Turnpike) must turn right (north) onto State Route 147 (Huguenot Road). After going 0.5 miles, Black Heath was on the left. In the present day, 0.5 miles north of Midlothian Turnpike on Huguenot Road on the left leads a traveler to another road called Olde Coach Drive, which is 0.3 miles north of Old Buckingham Road. There is a neighborhood surrounding these two roads, with streets having names that probably derive from the Black Heath estate like Heathmere Crescent, Heathmere Court, Black Heath Road, and Olde Coalmine Road.

This 1888 map shows the location of the Black Heath mines south of present day Robious Road east of the Salisbury House between the Coalfield Station and Robious Station on the Richmond and Danville rail line.

The geology of the area about 10 miles (16 km) west of the fall line of the James River near present-day Richmond, Virginia includes a basin of coal which was one of the earliest mined in the Virginia Colony. This natural resource was mined by the French Huguenot refugees who settled there and others beginning around 1700.[25]

By the second quarter of the 18th century, a number of private coal pits were operating on a commercial scale in a coalfield located in the area now known as Midlothian. Miners immigrated to Chesterfield from Wales, England and Scotland. The Wooldridge family from East Lothian in Scotland was among the first to undertake coal mining in the area.[26] The mining community was originally called Coalfield after Coalfield Station, a railroad station on the Richmond and Danville Railroad (now Norfolk Southern Railway). Eventually the name changed from Coalfield Village to Midlothian Village, named after the Wooldridge brothers' Mid-Lothian Coal Mining Company and Abraham S. Wooldridge's house, Midlothian. The Heths, beginning with Colonel Henry "Harry" Heth, who was born about 1760, opened coal pits in the county as early as 1785.[27]

Black Heath was the name of a coal basin and also of some mines located in this basin. Mining operations started there in 1785 or 1788.[28][29] The basin was of an oval shape extending north and south and is at times 40 feet thick.[30] The most famous mine and eponym of the Black Heath basin was the Black Heath pit. There is uncertainty about the date coal was found and when it was first mined. A Hessian doctor, after fighting in the American Revolutionary War, traveled around the new country in 1783 to 1784 and wrote about preliminary operations of the Black Heath mines. U.S. President Thomas Jefferson had the White House in Washington, D.C. heated with the high quality coal from the Black Heath mines. Commenting on the area's coal in his Notes on the State of Virginia, written in 1781–82, then-Governor Jefferson stated: "The country on James river, from 15 to 20 miles above Richmond, and for several miles northward and southward, is replete with mineral coal of a very excellent quality."[31] Jefferson was also referring not only to the Midlothian area, but also to the area of western Henrico County adjacent across the James River near Gayton and Deep Run. There were three shafts in the Black Heath mine and at the bottom of each tunnels connected each shaft.

Sometime between 1810 and 1830, the Black Heath pits were worked out and abandoned, later having disastrous consequences for the Black Heath house. Later, the nearby Maidenhead pits were known as the Black Heath pits as a result of the association with the Heth coal mining company, the Black Heath Company of Colliers. This company was the idea of the three living members of a four man partnership set up by Harry Heth before his death in 1821. These men, Beverley Randolph, his brother-in-law John Heth, and Heth's younger brother Beverley, petitioned the Virginia General Assembly on January 25, 1832, for the first coal mining corporation to be chartered in Virginia. After substantial opposition to the concept, this was accomplished the following year on February 20, 1833, with the incorporation of the Black Heath Company of Colliers. All of these men had experience in the coal trade. In 1827, Beverley Randolph had also been one of the organizers of the Chesterfield Railroad, a 12-mile gravity line built from Falling Creek to Manchester for the purpose of transporting coal to ships in the navigable portion of the James River for export. Opened in 1831, it was the first commercial railroad in Virginia and second in the United States.

The Maidenhead pits had been discovered and opened in 1821 and had many shafts sunk into the property ranging from 150 to 700 feet deep. Some explosions occurred in these mines prior to 1839. The two major and deepest shafts were 700 feet deep (the 1839 explosion happened in this shaft) and 600 feet deep (this shaft was completed in 1840). The coal from these mines was about 36 feet in thickness and in 1841 the Maidenhead mines were estimated to produce 2 million bushels of coal per year (at the rate of 1 bushel = 80 pounds, this would be 80,000 tons per year and about 219 tons a day).

In early 1836 a petition was made to the Virginia legislature asking "for a charter for a Rail-Road, from the Pits of the Black Heath Company of Colliers to James River, at some point above Bosher's Dam."[32] This railroad, officially called the James river and Blackheath rail-road, was laid out and began construction in the summer of 1837. The route ran downhill from the Maidenhead mines to the James River and intersected the Salle Pits. From there, the coal would be taken across the river and down the Kanawha Canal to Richmond to be sold. This railroad lasted from 1838 to approximately 1850 and was around 3 to 4 miles long.

In 1854 the Maidenhead mines closed after one last explosive disaster.

• Lutz, Frank E. (1954) Chesterfield, An Old Virginia County, William Byrd Press, Inc., Richmond, Virginia.
• O'Dell, Jeffrey M. (1983) Chesterfield County: Early Architecture and Historic Sites, Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors, Chesterfield, Virginia. See specifically, Black Heath, pp. 288–90
• Virginia State Library (1965) A Hornbook of Virginia History, Virginia Library Board, Richmond, Virginia.
• Weaver, Bettie W. (1961–62) The Mines of Midlothian, in Virginia Cavalcade Winter: pp. 40–47.
• Routon, Charles R. (1949) A history of the Midlothian coal mines, University of Richmond Scholarship Repository - Master's Theses, Richmond, Virginia - https://scholarship.richmond.edu/masters-theses/1067/

• Virginia Historical Marker O-45 Black Heath
• The Village of Midlothian
• Virginia Places: Coal Transportation pages
• Midlothian Mines and Rail Road Foundation
• Coal Mining in Chesterfield County, Virginia website
• Virginia Historical Society
• Chesterfield Historical Society
• Civil War Richmond
• College of William and Mary, Railroads in Antebellum Richmond
• Virginia Places, Sectional Rivalry page