What Should I Know Before Buying a Pre-1900 Richmond Home?
House Years · No. 1 · Before 1900 - Oh how I love a NY, or Boston Brownstone!
Grab your cup, folks. We're starting at "a" beginning, I have to start somewhere! So let's go with homes built before 1900. Much earlier than that and you're usually standing in a museum. I'll admit it: I love a New York or Boston brownstone. Richmond has its own answer to them.
Picture a brick house on a Church Hill street early in the morning, the first light just catching the cornice. It has stood there for well over a century of Virginia summers. It has been rained on, frozen, thawed and baked, and it is still holding up a roof.
That is not a small thing. It is the strongest structural argument any house can make, and no new construction can make it yet.
So I'm starting this series where Richmond's housing stock starts, with a claim that surprises people: in pre-1900 Richmond homes, the original construction wasn't an issue, it's the last forty years of well-intentioned upgrades usually are and buyers expectations.
A quick word on Church Hill
Church Hill sits on a bluff above the James River. It is one of Richmond's oldest surviving residential neighborhoods and part of the city's original plat. St. John's Church, built in 1741, anchors it. In 1775 Patrick Henry stood up there at the Second Virginia Convention and delivered "Give me liberty or give me death!"
Through the 1800s the hill filled in with merchants and tradesmen, in a grid of rowhouses and small commercial buildings. Nearby Chimborazo Hill held Chimborazo Hospital, one of the largest Confederate hospitals of the Civil War. In 1925 the Church Hill Tunnel collapsed beneath the neighborhood, killing workers and burying a steam locomotive. Local historians are still fascinated by it.
Houses that have lived through all of that have earned a close look, which is what the rest of this post is about.
What pre-1900 Richmond homes got right
The lumber. Old-growth timber, tight-grained, dense, and cut oversized. You really can't buy this material today. It is stiffer and more dimensionally stable than modern framing lumber, and it is a large part of why these floors are still flat.
The masonry. Richmond's nineteenth-century brickwork was done by people who did nothing else, often with brick fired locally. Walk Jackson Ward slowly sometime and look up at the corbelling and the cornice detail. That isn't decoration added to a building... that's a trade working at the top of its ability.
The proportions. High ceilings, tall operable windows, and a plan that ventilates itself without any mechanical help at all. These houses were designed for a Virginia summer before air conditioning existed, and they are still good at it. Open those tall windows on a June evening and you'll feel it.
Repairability. Nearly everything in a pre-1900 house can be repaired rather than replaced, by a person with hand tools. Very little built in the last thirty years can say that.
Lime mortar, and the most expensive mistake in Richmond
If you take one thing from this post, take this one.
Historic brick is soft. The mortar holding it was also soft — lime-based, and deliberately weaker than the brick around it. That isn't a limitation of old technology. It's the design! Mortar is meant to be sacrificial. When the wall moves, when moisture needs to escape, the mortar gives way first and gets replaced. The brick survives.
Modern Portland-cement mortar is hard. Harder than the brick.
Repoint a nineteenth-century wall with it and you have flipped the relationship. Now the mortar is the strong element and the brick is the weak one. Moisture that used to leave through the joint is trapped and pushed out through the face of the brick instead. It freezes there. The brick face spalls off in sheets.
This happens in Richmond year after year, to beautiful houses, done by people trying to take care of them. It is expensive, it is largely irreversible, and it is the first thing I look for on a masonry house of this age.
How to spot a bad repoint: the new joints look different — often grayer, sometimes smeared wide across the brick face, frequently tooled to a different profile than the original. Look for brick faces flaking or crumbling right beside a crisp modern joint. That contrast is the whole story.
Balloon framing
Pre-1900 wood framing in this region is typically balloon-framed: the studs run continuously from the sill all the way to the roof, with the floors hung off them, rather than each floor being built as a separate platform.
It is strong and it is straight. It also means the stud cavities are uninterrupted vertical chases from basement to attic. That has implications for fire blocking, and it's one of the things an inspector notes and a buyer should understand rather than fear. Remediation exists and is routine.
Slate, and what looks worse than it is
A slate roof with a few slipped or missing pieces often reads as a disaster to a buyer... and it is frequently in better condition than the composition roof on a house a third its age. Slate does not have a twenty-year lifespan. Properly installed, on sound framing, with flashing that has been maintained, it can go a century or more.
What fails on a slate roof is usually the fasteners, the flashing, and the valleys — not the slate. Those are repairable. Ask whether anyone has overlaid it, and ask who has been on it.
Knob-and-tube remnants
You will find traces of original wiring in houses of this age, usually where an update was partial. This has a documented history of concerns and warrants evaluation by a licensed electrician. What matters is the condition of the specific installation — whether it is live, what has been spliced into it, and whether it is buried in insulation — not the label alone.
What I look at first
The mortar joints, before anything else
Sill plates and joist ends where they meet masonry — this is where water and time do the real structural damage
The basement, for water history and for what has been done to the framing over a century of access
Roof edges, valleys, and flashings, rather than the field of the roof
The modern layer — additions, kitchen and bath renovations, and system updates. On a house this old, in my experience, the problems tend to concentrate in the later work rather than the original construction
If you're falling for one
Don't let the age frighten you, and don't let the charm rush you. These houses are not fragile. They have been proving otherwise for well over a century.
What they are is specific. They want mortar that matches, tradespeople who have done this before, and an owner who understands that maintenance on a house like this is a relationship rather than a project.
Next month: 1900 to 1919, when the streetcar pushed the city outward and gave us the Fan. See you there!
Already home and staying put? Houses keep changing long after closing day. A maintenance inspection gives you a fresh look at what's aging, what's perfectly fine, and what to plan for... on your own schedule, not in the middle of a sale. Pick a date for a maintenance inspection here.
Clear details. Confident decisions.
ACCM Residential Services, a different kind of home inspector. Serving Richmond and Central Virginia.
Alison L. Mullins · inspections@accmva.com · accmva.com
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