In the summer of 1862, Richmond suffered from an overpopulation of Union prisoners of war. To remedy the situation, Confederate officials purchased a fifty-four-acre island in the James River from Old Dominion Iron and Nail Works. The island, formerly a vacation spot for the people of Richmond, was located at the fall line of the James River, and Confederate authorities reasoned that the site’s swift rapids would discourage escape attempts. In the meantime, the bridge connecting the island to the city could facilitate the movement of prisoners to the Richmond and Danville Railroad for easy transfer to points outside Richmond.
What happened to Carr Square?
The neighborhood flourished for a century before modernist city planners replaced it with what they saw as the future.
Carr Square Park, Compton and Dry s Pictorial St. Louis, 1876
Neighborhoods in St. Louis were annihilated in the years after World War II in the name of âprogress.â Iâve looked at Mill Creek in the past, and recently I investigated the vanished Kosciusko neighborhood on the near South Side. But a neighborhood that almost no one remembers today, but yet probably features in the family history of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of St. Louisans and Americans, is the Carr Square neighborhood north of downtown. I touched on the deplorable living conditions of one part of that historic section of St. Louis years ago, as the attention of the plight of the desperately poor living in the rundown tenements north of Washington Avenue came to light to early 20th century reformers. But the entire neighborhood was not