Belle Isle

Belle Isle, a fifty-four-acre island in the James River at Richmond, has shifted over centuries from Powhatan homeland to colonial fishing site, ironworks center, and village. Mapped by John Smith in 1607 and later developed with industry and housing, it became one of Richmond’s bleakest Civil War places when it served as a prison camp for Union soldiers from 1862 to 1865. About 30,000 prisoners passed through, and as many as 1,000 died amid exposure, hunger, disease, and overcrowding. In the twentieth century it gained a hydroelectric plant, and today it is both a park and a landscape where natural beauty, industrial ruins, and wartime memory meet.

Richmond, Virginia · United States