At the time of European settlement, part of the area that became Charlottesville was occupied by a Monacan village called Monasukapanough.
An Act of the Assembly of Albemarle County established Charlottesville in 1762. Thomas Walker was named its first trustee. It was situated along a trade route called Three Notched Road (present day U.S. Route 250), which led from Richmond to the Great Valley. The town took its name from the British queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.
During the American Revolutionary War, Congress imprisoned the Convention Army in Charlottesville at the Albemarle Barracks between 1779 and 1781.
The Governor and legislators had to temporarily abandon the capitol and on June 4, 1781, Jack Jouett warned the Virginia Legislature meeting at Monticello of a planned raid by Colonel Banastre Tarleton, allowing a narrow escape.
Unlike much of Virginia, Charlottesville was spared the brunt of the American Civil War. The only battle to take place in Charlottesville was the skirmish at Rio Hill, an encounter in which George Armstrong Custer briefly engaged local Confederate Home Guards before retreating. A year later, the Charlottesville Factory, founded c. 1820–30, was accidentally burnt during General Philip Sheridan’s 1865 raid through the Shenandoah Valley, although the mayor had surrendered the city to Generals Custer and Sheridan to keep the town from being burned. The factory had been taken over by the Confederacy and used to manufacture woolen clothing for the soldiers. It caught fire when some coals taken by Union troops to burn the nearby railroad bridge dropped on the floor. The factory was rebuilt immediately and was known as the Woolen Mills until its liquidation in 1962.
After the Civil War, emancipated slaves who remained in Charlottesville established communities in neighborhoods such as Vinegar Hill.
After Reconstruction ended, Charlottesville’s African American population suffered under Jim Crow laws that segregated public places and limited opportunity. Schools were racially segregated and African Americans were not served in many local businesses. Public parks were planned separately for the white and African American populations: four for whites, and one for African Americans built on the site of a former dump. The Ku Klux Klan had chapters in the Charlottesville area beginning at least in the early twentieth century, and events such as lynchings and cross burnings occurred in the Charlottesville area. In 1898, Charlottesville resident John Henry James was lynched in the nearby town of Ivy. In August 1950, three white men were observed burning a cross on Cherry Avenue, a street in a mostly African-American neighborhood in Charlottesville. It was speculated that the cross burning might be a reaction to “a white man had been known to socialize with one of the young Negro women in that vicinity.” In 1956, crosses were burned outside a progressive church and the home of white integration activist Sarah Patton Boyle.
In 1947, Charlottesville organized a local NAACP branch. In 2001, the Charlottesville and Albemarle Branches of the NAACP merged to form the Albemarle-Charlottesville NAACP Branch.
In the fall of 1958, Charlottesville closed its segregated white schools as part of Virginia’s strategy of massive resistance to federal court orders requiring integration as part of the implementation of the Supreme Court of the United States decision Brown v. Board of Education. The closures were required by a new series of state laws collectively known as the Stanley Plan, which prohibited and denied funding to integrated public schools. Segregated schools remained open, however.[page needed] The first African-American member of the Charlottesville School Board was Raymond Bell in 1963.
In 1963, later than many Southern cities, civil rights activists in Charlottesville began protesting segregated restaurants with sit-ins, such as one that occurred at Buddy’s Restaurant near the University of Virginia.
In 1965, the city government razed the downtown African American neighborhood Vinegar Hill as an urban renewal project, after the city council passing a law that “unsanitary and unsafe” properties could be taken over by a housing authority. One hundred thirty homes, five Black-owned businesses, and a church were destroyed. Many displaced community members moved into the Westhaven public housing project. The land was not redeveloped until the late 1970s.
Despite razing this small area comprising about 20 acres abutting West Main Street in the city’s commercial downtown area, Charlottesville maintained its vibrant black community spanning the much larger and still extant Ridge Street and Fifeville neighborhoods to the south, and the Tenth & Page and Rose Hill neighborhoods to the north. Neighborhood civic associations, social clubs and church groups sponsored activities for its residents. The Blue Mints Social Club met at the home of Mrs. Reva Shelton on December 1, 1974. At this meeting, the group planned their annual “Baskets of Cheer,” hosted a Cabaret Dance on New Year’s Eve at Carver Recreation Center, with the Randolph Brothers performing. In 1974, other social clubs listed are the Bethune Art and Literary Club, The Lucky Twenty Club, and the Les Amies Club.
Starting in the 2010s Charlottesville received national attention because of local conflict between those who do and those who do not want Confederate symbols removed. The Washington Post has reported that “Nowhere has this clash been more fraught than in Charlottesville, where parks have been renamed, then renamed again, streets have been re-christened, and stickers bearing white supremacist slogans go up as quickly as activists can remove them.”
City attempts to remove statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson from downtown parks have been the subject of extensive, unresolved litigation. In August 2017, white supremacist groups opposed to their removal organized the “Unite the Right rally”, to protest against the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue from then Lee Park, subsequently renamed Emancipation Park. After the rally, a white nationalist drove a car into protesters, resulting in the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer and causing injuries to 19 others. The incident became national news and Charlottesville became a symbol of political turbulence nationwide. The city succeeded in the removal of the Lee and Jackson statues on July 10, 2021, in addition to a statute of Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea.
On July 1, 2019, the Charlottesville City Council voted 4 to 1 to drop Thomas Jefferson’s birthday as a city holiday; according to news stories, this was because Jefferson was a slave owner. In a separate vote, they unanimously created a new day of celebration called Liberation and Freedom Day, to be celebrated on March 3, the day in 1865 when Gen. Philip Sheridan’s troops rolled through town and found a population that was majority enslaved – and although emancipation for most of them didn’t occur on that day, it was the opening salvo for a lot of Charlottesvillians’ freedom.[full citation needed]
A small plaque in a downtown sidewalk marked the site of Charlottesville’s slave auction block. In 2020 it was removed by a private individual, who said he did so because, in his opinion, “slaves and their descendants deserved a more prominent memorial”, and was frustrated by inaction from the Charlottesvile city government.
Christ Episcopal Church was Charlottesville’s first church. It was begun in 1820 by builders on loan from Thomas Jefferson, and the congregation’s current home was completed in the early 1900s.
The first black church in Charlottesville, the First Baptist Church of Charlottesville, was established in 1864. Previously, it was illegal for African-Americans to have their own churches, although they were allowed to worship in designated areas in white churches, if the white church members allowed it. Its first black pastor (previously, it was required by law that all churches have white pastors), was William D. Gibbons. The date he became pastor is not known with certainty, but was about 1868. A current predominantly African-American church can trace its lineage to that first church.
Congregation Beth Israel’s 1882 building is the oldest synagogue building still standing in Virginia. In 1974, some of the Baptist churches in Charlottesville included the Union Run Baptist Church, the South Garden Baptist Church, and the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
The first Catholic church in Charlottesville was the Church of the Paraclete, built in 1880 and erected as a parish in 1896. In 1906 the church building was renovated and the parish was renamed to Holy Comforter. A second parish was erected for the growing Catholic population in 1976 called the Church of the Incarnation. In 1967 a Dominican-run parish for Catholic students at the University of Virginia was dedicated (replacing a Newman Center begun in 1943), and named St. Thomas Aquinas University Parish. The first Mass of record in Charlottesville was celebrated in the parlor of F. M. Paoli’s residence, presumably on Random Row, now West Main Street. Services were held for about 12 years after that in the Town Hall. The presiders were priests who came from St. Francis Assisi Church in Staunton and then traveled on to other missions in the area.
