Category: Automobiles
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Scottsville Volunteer Fire Department’s 75th Anniversary
by Marianne Ramsden Scottsville made a concerted effort to keep the town safe from fires since the beginning of the 1900’s. A bucket brigade formed in 1905, and the town fire hydrants were installed in 1916. That same year, the volunteer fire fighters raised enough money to buy two fire hose reel carts. These carts…
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Traveler’s Rest Hotel
The Traveler’s Rest was a wood-framed hotel built about 1909 by Jacinto V. Pereira, who was also the President of Fidelity Nationial Bank on Valley Street. The leading hotel in Scottsville for 67 years, the Traveler’s Rest contained nineteen hotel rooms with two bathrooms on each floor. The dining room sat approximately sixty people at…
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Doctor Percy Harris, Sr.
Shown in this 1915 photo, Dr. Percy Harris, Sr. stands beside his Maxwell car on West Main Street with Valley Street behind him. The building just behind his right elbow is W.F. Paulett Lumber and at the photo’s left is a three-storied, white building called the Travelers’ Rest Hotel. Percy enrolled in the Medical College…
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Crossing the James River via the Scottsville Bridge
by Evelyn Edson, President Scottsville Museum Scottsville was founded in 1745 at the horseshoe bend, a traditional crossing point where there was a gap in the bluffs lining the James River. I suppose most of us, who have lived in Scottsville for a while, have waded across the James when it was at its lowest…
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Auto Endurance Test on Valley Street ~ 1914
Dr. L.R. Stinson owned the first car in Scottsville, a two-cylinder, bright-red, 1910 Maxwell. Soon these ‘motorized carriages’ were rattling the plank floor on the new town bridge. Cars altered Scottsville’s way of life greatly, wiping out the ferry, carriages and carts, and the blacksmith shop and stable on the corner of Valley and Main…
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The Scottsville Bridge
This landscape with Scottsville in the background shows the wooden bridge, built in 1907, which replaced Scott’s Ferry as the medium for transporting traffic to Scottsville from Buckingham Co. This bridge remained until 1968 when a new concrete one replaced it. See the image below as a guide to points of interest: Copyright © 2018…
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Paving Route 20 to Charlottesville
The road (Route 20) between Scottsville and Charlottesville was known as the ‘Road of the Presidents’ in the 1800’s because Presidents Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe often traveled over it. In those years, the trip between the two towns was arduous and bone-jarring as the macadam used on the road was a thin, poor tar mixture…
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The Hatton Ferry
1800’s, 1900’s, 2000’s, Automobiles, Commerce, Featured, Ferries, Floods, Hatton, Horse, People, TransportationPhoto above, Hatton Ferry, ca. 1910 Hatton Ferry is a poled ferry that crosses the James River at a site named Hatton about three and one-fourth miles south west of Scottsville, Virginia. James A. Brown, a storekeeper, began operating a ferry at this location in the late 1870’s. In 1906, James Benson Tindall of Buckingham…
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Rural Mail Carriers in Scottsville ~ 1915
On a crisp autumn day, four rural mail carriers pose in front of the Scottsville Post Office, the town’s social gathering point. More than any other invention, ‘motorized carriages’ altered Scottsville life the most. With mass production of the Model T Ford, cars were readily available and rapidly acquired by admiring Scottsville customers. Gone were…
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