City Council of Charlottesville
606 East Main Street  #A230
Charlottesville, VA  22902
12/15/15
2132 Ivy Road
Dear Charlottesville City Council,

As students of the “Issues of Race and Gender” class at St. Anne’s Belfield School in Charlottesville, we respectfully would like to bring an issue to your attention that we have become aware of.  In our studies of local African American history, the lack of representation of the history of Vinegar Hill, coined ‘a forgotten neighborhood’, caught our attention. Established in the 1800s, Vinegar Hill was the center of the African American community after the Civil War.  Between the 1920s and 1960s, it served as a business district and residential area for the Charlottesville African American community. However, in the 1960s, all 20 acres of Vinegar Hill were deemed “substandard”, and the town voted to redevelop the neighborhood through the Urban Renewal program. With the initiation of the Poll Tax, many African American residents of Vinegar Hill were not able to vote on the matter. Subsequently, 500 people, including 158 families, 140 of which were African American, were displaced and moved to Westhaven Public Housing.

Today all that remains of Vinegar Hill, a historically rich and once vital hub of a Charlottesville community, is a ‘marker’ on Water Street. This marker, intended to commemorate the Vinegar Hill community, resides knee level on a wall at the entrance of the Downtown Mall. Barely visible, hidden between a trashcan and a landscape planter, the Vinegar Hill marker is a poor representation of this historic neighborhood.

The City of Charlottesville has take admirable steps to recognize the African American community of Charlottesville including the restoration of the Jefferson School and African American Heritage Center. To bring the commemorative sign for Vinegar Hill on par with these steps we propose that the current marker be replaced with a two by three foot interpretive sign depicting the history of Vinegar Hill. The organization, the Vinegar Hill Project, states that the 1960s redevelopment of the neighborhood underlined “the destructive impact of gentrification and the erasure of African American history.” With your help, we hope amend this opinion to ensure that this period of Charlottesville’s history, and the people who lived in Vinegar Hill are properly remembered as the vibrant community it once was.