The Bright Hope Railroad was an important export tool for Chesterfield County. The Bright Hope hauled coal from the Midlothian mines through Chester to Osborne’s Landing, approximately where the Virginia Dominion Power Plant is located. In 1877, the narrow gage railroad had its shops located in Chester generally along the current Shop Street. The Bright Hope ran four coal trains a day and one passenger train. The line went into foreclosure 1899 and reorganized as the Tidewater-Western. The rails were eventually sold to France in 1917 for use in World War I. By the end of the war the rails…

One of the major beneficiaries of the Morse telegraph was the American railroad system. The telegraph made it possible to accurately track the position of trains by passing critical information between railroad stations. The Richmond-Petersburg Railroad had been previously dependent on lamps and other less reliable means could now be confirmed by railroad dispatchers. A little known fact is that technically, Morse had developed the first system of truly digital communications, a concept which has only recently entered commercial use. His alphabetical, numerical and punctuation characters, represented by long and short electrical bursts, is not unlike the basis of the…

Toward the end of World War II, captured German soldiers were housed behind what is now DSCR. Unlike the treatment that American POWs got in Germany, POWs held here were treated fairly. According to DSCR history, “In 1943, a 2,000 capacity prisoner of war camp was built on a 50-acre parcel adjacent to the depot. German POWs built the camp which held 1,200 German prisoners, with 130 military policemen guarding the camp.” Prisoners worked outside the camp but were paid for their work, though they received scrip that could be used only at the camp canteen. Quite a few POWs…

The photo above is of an early peanut plant bagging machine in southern Chesterfield. When Africans were brought to North America as slaves, peanuts came with them. Slaves planted peanuts throughout the southern United States (the word goober comes from the Congo name for peanuts – nguba). In the 1700s, peanuts, then called groundnuts or ground peas, were studied by botanists and regarded as an excellent food for pigs. Until 1900 peanuts were not extensively grown, partially because they were regarded as food for the poor, and because growing and harvesting were slow and difficult until labor-saving equipment was invented…

In late November 1961, the ground shook from Bellwood to the City of Colonial Heights; from Enon to the Courthouse. The Howard Johnson’s Restaurant (now Deny’s) on West Hundred Road just west of the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike (now Interstate 95) had blown up. Sixteen persons were injured including then Bermuda District Supervisor Garland Dodd. A preliminary investigation indicated that the boiler in the basement had malfunctioned. The roof dropped about four feet and the concrete floor buckled. Windows were blown out and all that remained were small shards of glass. One woman’s legs were trapped under a concrete block wall. About…