Dispatches
Updates from the field
The stone bones of a forgotten grist mill still stand vigil over the rapids of the James. Built in the 1830s and destroyed by floods four decades later, Foushee Mill is our first fully documented True Place -- complete with written story and one-minute video tour. We hiked in through the James River Park System to find walls that have outlasted generations.
Read more →Every True Place deserves more than a photograph. This spring we launch One Minute Wonders -- sixty-second cinematic tours of Richmond's hidden places. Each video captures what still images cannot: the sound of water through a ruined mill race, the way light falls through a collapsing roof, the scale that photographs always flatten.
Read more →A weekend walk along the James River and Kanawha Canal turned up three sites we had never noticed despite years of passing by. A crumbling retaining wall with iron tie-rods still intact, a sealed arch beneath a parking deck, and what appears to be the foundation of a long-demolished warehouse. All three are now on our list for full documentation.
Read more →Richmond is layered. Beneath the craft breweries and the murals, there are centuries of human ambition written in stone, iron, and earth. True Places RVA exists to find those layers, document them, and tell their stories before time finishes what it started. This is day one. We have a map, a camera, and a list of places most people walk right past.
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