Petersburg Museums

Petersburg’s museums include Blandford Church, Centre Hill Mansion, Blandford Cemetery, and the Siege Museum. Blandford Church was built in 1735 for Anglican colonists and was abandoned in 1806 after a new church was consecrated in downtown Petersburg. In the late nineteenth century, the Ladies Memorial Association of Petersburg began restoring it as a Confederate Memorial chapel and sought funds from each former Confederate state for stained glass windows honoring that state’s Confederate soldiers. Louis Comfort Tiffany’s studio designed fifteen memorial compass windows, with the Virginia, Missouri, and Louisiana windows unveiled first in 1904; each large window depicts a Saint with associated symbols, and four smaller windows complement the larger ones. Centre Hill Mansion, built in 1823 by Robert Bolling IV, remained an opulent residence until 1936 and became a museum in 1950, with exhibits on its Civil War role, visits by Abraham Lincoln and William Taft, decorative arts, a service tunnel from the 1840s, and Petersburg history, as well as church furnishings from First Baptist Church, Harrison Street, Petersburg, the oldest African-American congregation in the United States. Blandford Cemetery, beside Blandford Church, has been used for burials since the eighteenth century, contains a marked grave from 1702, and holds as many as 30,000 Confederate soldiers along with monuments, tombs, and decorative ironwork from several artistic periods. The Siege Museum presents the 9½ month military siege of Petersburg and its effects on civilians through artifacts, writings, exhibits on the city’s four hundred year history, and a film narrated by Petersburg native Joseph Cotton; its building, constructed in 1839 as an agricultural exchange, later served civic and commercial uses before the city restored it and opened it as the museum in 1978.

Petersburg, Virginia · United States