Richmond Virginia History - Rio Vista Neighborhood - 1972 RVA Photography Book
Forget Me Nots: Memories of Rio Vista, Virginia by Mary Thompson Parks is a locally focused memoir that preserves the history and daily life of a small, now-disappeared community on the western edge of Richmond, Virginia. Written in a reflective, first-person voice, the book documents Rio Vista, a former post office village and rural neighborhood that existed near the James River and along the Three Chopt Road corridor before suburban expansion altered the landscape. Parks presents the book as an act of remembrance, capturing personal experience, oral history, and place-based memory to ensure that Rio Vista’s people and stories are not lost.
In the opening chapter, Rio Vista, Gone, But Not Forgotten, Parks situates the community in a specific historical moment. She notes that in 1911 the Virginia Business Directory and Gazetteer recorded a population of only twenty-five residents. She reproduces an incomplete list of inhabitants that includes W.F. Adams, J.P. Badenoch, A.F. Baughan, H.C. Baughan, John Carter, D.B. Connard, John E. Dicks, James E. Franklin, Walter Grant, D. Higginbotham, T.B. Higginbotham, J.C. Holt, John Lennox, Samuel Register, J.F. Shaw, J.T. Shepperson, Mrs. Herbert Sutton, J.B. Thomas, and J.T. Walton, along with families living on Three Chopt Road, St. Andrews Lane, and Cary Street Road. Parks observes that only one woman appears in the official count and that no children were listed, emphasizing the limits of government records and the importance of personal recollection.
A central section of the book, An Early Settler Reminisces, is based on conversations with Mrs. Thomas Purcell, who built her home at 6402 Three Chopt Road in 1907. Through Mrs. Purcell’s memories, Parks reconstructs everyday life in early Rio Vista, including the belief that malaria came from fog rising off the James River and the common practice of taking quinine each spring. Medical care is described through the work of Dr. B.H. Martin, who treated patients suffering from tuberculosis with fresh country air and goats’ milk and who expressed caution about the effects of newly introduced aspirin, which Mrs. Purcell recalled as producing near-miraculous relief from headaches.
The book also documents transportation, education, and social life in the neighborhood. Parks recalls coal deliveries that arrived by train at Westham Station and were hauled by wagon to local homes, as well as the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, which would stop for passengers simply by being waved down. She describes the transfer of a country day school from Grove Avenue to St. Christopher Lane by Dr. and Mrs. Chamberlayne, an institution that later became St. Christopher’s School under the Episcopal Diocese. Recreational life appears in memories of horseback riding along Patterson Avenue, Towana Road, and wooded paths leading back to Three Chopt Road, as well as visits among neighbors whose homes once lined these roads.
Throughout Forget Me Nots, Mary Thompson Parks combines named individuals, precise locations, and firsthand memories to create a detailed microhistory of Rio Vista and its surrounding area. The book is especially valuable for its documentation of people, roads, schools, medical practices, and transportation networks that shaped everyday life in this small James River community. As a result, it serves as an important primary source for understanding early twentieth-century settlement patterns and neighborhood life on the western outskirts of Richmond, preserving a place that has largely vanished from the modern landscape.
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