End of an Era

Ain't Gonna work on Goddard's Farm No More

No, I ain't gonna work on Goddard's Farm no more

The State hands you a nickel

It hands you a dime

It asks you with a grin

If you're havin' a good time

Then they fine you every time you slam the door

I ain't gonna work on Goddard's Farm no more.

                  ~ apologies to Bob Dylan

In truth no one has been working on Goddard’s Farm for a really long time.  As the “needs of the community” have grown over the years, Goddard’s Dairy Farm became the victim of progress, American style.  Once a burgeoning dairy farm, the silos gave way to the former Richmond – Petersburg Turnpike which opened for business in ’58, before I-95 was constructed.  The 30-mile stretch of superhighway was eventually incorporated into I-95, but maintained its tolls until 1992.

That was the beginning of the end for Goddard’s Farm.  The farm was prime property for the highway and so the Virginia Department of Transportation managed to purchase the property from the Goddard family.  It left the Goddard’s with a sizable chunk of pretty much useless land inside the boundaries of Colonial Heights.

For years, people would pass the property, hardly noticing the tumble-down ante-bellum house with the mysterious lake.  That is until it came time for elections. Dozens of candidates over the years displayed their “Vote for Me” sign at a notch in one of the enormous oak trees just east of the house.  It even had its own light to make the ad more visible at night as travelers took the Temple Avenue entrance ramp to Petersburg.

Sadly, that practice is now history as the oak tree succumbed to progress, along with two or three of its brothers.  The property has a storied history, sitting alongside the old railroad tracks that led from Richmond to Petersburg and was used by Robert E. Lee to support troops along the Howlett Line, which stretched between Swift Creek near its junction with the Appomattox River and the James River, near Chester.

The line in essence was the cork that “bottled up” Union General Benjamin Butler and led to the siege of Petersburg.

Beyond the Civil War, the Goddard family was known to support hobos, who would ride the rails in their journeys.  Lloyd Goddard, the current, and now last, resident of the house explained how his family would make sandwiches for the hobos as they rode the rails up and down the coast line.

Meanwhile, with the house now taken down, the pathway to VDOT’s and Colonial Heights’ soon to be new roundabout has little blocking its way except for the amount of work that needs to be done on the $20 million project.

Goddard’s wasn’t the only property to yield to “eminent domain” laws when VDOT was constructing the turnpike.  The road was designed to go through lower cost properties throughout its length.  VDOT has a series of books that contain pictures of the project.  You can see the areas of Richmond and the properties along Shockoe Bottom that yielded to the need for high-speed transportation.

No matter how you look at it, the times are a changing. Whether such change is good or bad is probably a personal choice.  No doubt there are issues with the way the current interchange is designed, I’m sure that the old powers that be in Colonial Heights hoped to minimize traffic and people coming in their city.

Now, of course, that philosophy has changed.  The city wants more and more people to come to shop or eat or just visit.  This project will mess up the city’s main east-west thoroughfare for more than a year.  Hopefully the Roundabout project will be run better than the Boulevard road project was.