Spring Park

The property that became known as Spring Park was part of a 400 acre tract owned by Samuel Williamson in 1796 and later inherited by his son Dabney, whose enslaved man Lewis took part in Gabriel’s Rebellion in 1800, tried to persuade comrades to free those arrested after the uprising unraveled, and was then tried and deported. The first record of the site as a mineral spring appears on an 1810 map, and it was later identified as a sulphur spring. The Bloomingdale Land Company probably built the granite spring house in the 1890s during a period of extensive land improvements, and in 1907 a real estate advertisement in the Richmond Times-Dispatch showed the park and spring as Spring Park beside a proposed subdivision. By 1933 the spring appears to have fallen out of use, and an affidavit to the Henrico County Board of Supervisors stated that neither the county nor the public had used the spring or park for many years, at least twenty years, and that the spring no longer existed. In Virginia, springs had been developed for health and entertainment as early as the 1700s, reached their height before the Civil War and in the late nineteenth century, and then declined in the early twentieth century as better medical treatments, changing social customs, and automobile travel reduced their popularity.

Lakeside, Virginia · United States