PETERSBURG, Va. — Richard Stewart always said the spirits of the past chose him to keep their tales alive. But he didn’t know how long he could do it.
For at least 20 years, Stewart collected thousands of objects in a homemade Black History Museum of Pocahontas Island, the historic community where he grew up. Photographs, books, Klan robes, slave shackles, even a mysterious locked trunk that was too heavy to lift — he had a story for everything.
With his savings from a military and civil service career, Stewart purchased properties around the neighborhood, which is one of the oldest free Black communities in the country. He decorated houses with handwritten messages on doorways, window frames, porch rails — any surface that could communicate the history so vivid in his mind.
The one thing Stewart couldn’t do was figure out who the spirits wanted to take up the task when he was gone. Two weeks ago, Stewart, 79 and seemingly in good health, sat down on his couch and never got back up.
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His death shocked Petersburg, 20 miles south of Richmond. Hundreds turned out on a rainy Saturday for his funeral, including most of City Council, the local sheriff, state Sen. Joseph Morrissey (D-Richmond) and former delegate Lashrecse Aird (D-Petersburg). Virginia’s two Democratic senators, Tim Kaine and Mark R. Warner, sent letters of tribute.
As one speaker after another remembered Stewart’s gift for gab and passion for Pocahontas Island, the outpouring emphasized the fragile nature of what he had done. Because for all the objects and properties Stewart saved, the real value was in his head — in the stories and memories that he spun into something almost mystical.
“He was the magic that woke up that museum,” former state senator Rosalyn Dance (D-Petersburg) told the crowd at Tabernacle Baptist Church. “You were hearing it firsthand from a man whose heart was in it.”
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Stewart’s death is “devastating,” said Lisa Winn Bryan, community outreach director for Preservation Virginia, an organization that declared Pocahontas Island one of the state’s most endangered historic sites in 2014. “Losing someone like him who takes those stories and that history with them is a treasure truly lost.”
In interviews over the years, including with The Washington Post, Stewart said he planned to leave his belongings to his daughter, who is married and lives in nearby Chesterfield County. But Stewart often said he didn’t know who would be able to handle the tremendous work of maintaining the properties — the mowing, painting and repairing that took up much of his time.
His daughter could not be reached for comment. Stewart’s longtime companion, Amanda Wyatt, said two days before his funeral that it was too soon for the family to process what comes next.
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“Petersburg and Pocahontas are going to miss a great man, because he dedicated his life to this place,” Wyatt said in a brief interview outside Stewart’s home. “He wanted to preserve his ancestors … This is where he grew up at, this is what he knew, and this is what he loved.”
For official Petersburg, where Stewart loomed large as the “honorary mayor” of Pocahontas Island and was a regular presence at public events, his passing creates a problem. The city has struggled with everything from high crime to troubled schools and loss of jobs, but one major asset is a rich and complex history — particularly Black history. While the city is planning an African American history museum of its own, no one has done more than Stewart to promote the subject.
“It’s a huge, huge loss for Petersburg,” Mayor Samuel Parham said in an interview. “I don’t really know how we fill that void and really where we go from here.”
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Pocahontas is more of a peninsula than an island, thanks to a channel of the Appomattox River that silted up more than 100 years ago. The neighborhood lies between the river and downtown Petersburg, whose spires and crooked rooflines are little changed from the Civil War era.
Archaeology has turned up evidence of a Native American presence on the island thousands of years ago; European colonists laid out a handful of streets in 1749 and established a town of Pocahontas three years later.
Over time, nearby Petersburg — a major tobacco port and later hub for railroads — absorbed Pocahontas. By the mid-1800s, Petersburg had the largest free Black population in Virginia, and most of those Black residents lived on Pocahontas Island.
That created what the nomination form for Pocahontas Island’s inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places called “a rarity in Virginia until the Jim Crow era of the later nineteenth century: a racially segregated, predominately black community.”
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Stewart’s family had deep roots there. He was orphaned as a teenager, but said community elders raised him and filled his head with stories of the past. Stewart could spin yarns about escaped slaves taking the Underground Railroad to meet ships heading for Norfolk; about mixed-race families owning property and businesses; about Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a local barber who would become the first elected president of Liberia.
His stories weren’t just local legends. Dance, the former state senator, recalled running into Stewart at the Library of Virginia in Richmond on some of his many research trips.
In 1993, Dance was in her first year as mayor of Petersburg when a major tornado tore through the historic downtown and across the river, damaging or destroying most of the structures on Pocahontas Island.
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That’s when she got to know Stewart, who pressed the young mayor with a refrain that became his catchphrase: “Don’t forget about Pocahontas Island.”
Tomeria Allen Jordan, 38, grew up with extended family on Pocahontas Island and vividly remembers Stewart bringing then-Gov. L. Douglas Wilder — the first Black man elected governor of any state since Reconstruction — to tour the damage after the tornado. By the time she was 11, Jordan had a paper route and would get so waylaid listening to stories on Stewart’s front porch that her mother would have to come looking for her.
“We would talk for a long time about life and history and the importance of knowing our history and knowing where we come from,” Jordan said. “He always said, ‘If we don’t know where we come from we don’t know where we’re going.’”
Stewart opened his museum in 2003, packed floor-to-ceiling with artifacts and mementos. It only took the city 20 years to catch up to the idea. Wayne Crocker, Petersburg’s library director, is leading efforts to start an African American history museum in the old house downtown where the segregated library was once located. He had spoken with Stewart about those plans, he said, and Stewart was supportive.
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“But I didn’t get a chance to actually talk with him about what happens to his artifacts and items that are in his museum,” Crocker said.
“I did have a very brief moment to talk with his daughter at the funeral services to let her know we were very interested in working with her in the museum,” he said. “In some respects, if it’s meant to happen it’s meant to happen. You know, we would maybe merge the two efforts somehow, and definitely give him the credit and continue his legacy.”
Bryan, of Preservation Virginia, and Justin Sarafin of the Historic Petersburg Foundation said much the same thing: They had spoken with Stewart about plans for his collection but never put anything in motion.
“We talked about what are some things that we could do to help preserve the pieces and the artifacts that he had,” Bryan said, describing a visit in January. “I was hoping to meet with different organizations, come up with funding ideas, find ways to help preserve the space and tell the story.”
While the fate of the museum is unresolved, some of Stewart’s other work on Pocahontas Island is starting to pay off. He had long pushed to reroute sewage trucks that circle through the neighborhood every day; a multimillion-dollar renovation of the nearby sewage treatment plant will soon send those trucks elsewhere.
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Stewart also wanted neighborhood residents to have a safe way to get to the Appomattox. He remembered playing there as a boy, and resented that a junkyard later came in and kept people away. Stewart bought as much property as he could toward creating access to the river, working to clear out debris left by the junkyard and an auto shop destroyed by the tornado.
About four years ago, local Rotary Club president Richard Taylor approached Stewart for permission to host a kayaking event for the Friends of the Lower Appomattox River. Stewart embraced the idea and let participants park on his property.
It was such a success that Taylor organized city and Rotary support to create a small park there, hauling out hundreds of dumped tires and building a new pavilion by the water.
“Now anything else we do there will be in Richard’s memory,” said Taylor, who said he spoke with Stewart the day before he died about the idea of planting trees on a vacant lot. “You know, the park doesn’t really have a name … I think it might be nice if it had Richard’s name. I’m thinking about that.”
About a month before he died, Stewart took part in a groundbreaking ceremony for the first new home built on Pocahontas Island in generations, apart from reconstruction work after the tornado. A young entrepreneur named Amanda Marlo Green, who works at nearby Virginia State University, said she was inspired by meeting Stewart a few years ago to help revitalize the neighborhood.
Now she’s brimming with ideas about creating a community nonprofit, finding partnerships to win grants to fix up homes for elderly retired residents, maybe painting a mural on an abandoned industrial building. Green, 38, said she was desperate for Stewart’s blessing and had begged him to come to the groundbreaking.
“I was so excited to see him — that meant everything to me,” she said.
Later that night in March, though, Stewart went to a City Council work session and questioned why only a few council members had attended the event. He sounded uncertain about what new development could mean.
“Is this the future of Pocahontas? Are we getting ready to develop Pocahontas?” he asked. “Or is this the downfall of Pocahontas?”
Those questions will linger for others to answer. But they’ll need to keep Stewart in mind.
In 2019, a group of filmmakers from Richmond released a documentary called “The Promise Land: The Story of Pocahontas Island,” in which Stewart talks at length about sensing the spirits of the place. Finally the narrator asks if Stewart expects to join them one day.
“I will roam this island with spirits wherever I’m at,” Stewart says. “I’ll stand guard on this island when I die. If there’s such a thing as coming back, I’m never going to leave here. They’re going to carry my earthly remains out of here, but my spirit will always be here, like my ancestors are still here right now.”
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