On August 22, Shepherd Stadium filled up the way it does for football season, except it was still summer and nobody was watching a game. Free admission, live music from the Hogslop String Band, a beer garden, a car show, a kids zone, and barbecue from Mr. Q's stretched from three in the afternoon until seven that evening. Americana Fest was the marquee event of Colonial Heights' hundredth birthday, the one with a stage and a headline act and a reason to bring a lawn chair.
Across town, Violet Bank sat behind a temporary fence. The house where Robert E. Lee ran his headquarters for four months during the Siege of Petersburg in 1864, the building that gives Colonial Heights the deepest single thread connecting its name to an actual historic event, has been closed to the public since June for exterior renovation. The city's most literal piece of history took itself offline in the exact year built to celebrate history.
That's not an oversight. It's a pattern worth understanding if you live here, because it tells you something about how this town has always operated, and it tells you where to actually spend your weekends for the rest of this centennial year.
The Party You Didn't Get Invited To, Because It Was Already Happening
Colonial Heights was incorporated as a town in 1926, which makes 2026 the hundredth year, and the city built a whole initiative around it called CH100. Here's the part that's easy to miss: CH100 isn't a calendar of new events the city invented for the occasion. It's a campaign that highlights the events, promotions, and stories that already make Colonial Heights what it is, and it invites local businesses and community groups to tag their existing offerings with the anniversary rather than build something from scratch.
In practice, that means the Sunset Series in the Park at Fort Clifton, an evening of music, food trucks, and cold beer that's run on summer nights for years, counts as a centennial event this year. So does the Keystone Truck & Tractor Museum's Trains, Trucks & Tractors weekend, which happened in mid-July at the museum's grounds on West Roslyn Road and was its fifth annual run, not its first. The museum wasn't founded for the hundredth birthday. It just happened to already be doing something worth folding into the story.
That's a different kind of anniversary than a ribbon cutting. It says the ordinary rhythm of the city, the park nights and the museum weekends that were happening anyway, is the actual substance of a hundred years, more than a single stage at Shepherd Stadium could be. If you've caught a food truck at Fort Clifton this summer, you've technically already been to a CH100 event. Nobody handed you a name tag.
The One Address Left Off the List
Which makes Violet Bank's closure stand out more, not less. The museum sits at 303 Virginia Avenue on the grounds of the old Violet Bank plantation, and it's the piece of Colonial Heights history that predates the town's actual incorporation by well over a century. It's a registered Virginia Historic Landmark, owned by the city, and it's the address most directly tied to why this place is called what it's called.
Right now you can't walk the grounds. The renovation is exterior work, not a permanent closure, and the city hasn't attached a fixed reopening date to the project as of this writing. For a hundredth birthday built around the idea that the past and present sit next to each other, that's an odd gap: the modern gathering spots are full of noise, and the oldest one is wrapped in construction fencing.
If you want the history piece of this year, your options right now run through the story itself rather than the building. Which is worth telling, because it's a good one.
Where the Name Actually Came From
In May 1781, French troops under the Marquis de Lafayette, known at the time as the Colonials, moved artillery onto the bluffs above the Appomattox River to shell British forces occupying Petersburg below. According to the account the city itself tells, an English soldier stationed in Petersburg looked up at the hill and said something close to "Look, there are the Colonials, up on the Heights." The name stuck to the geography a century and a half before there was a town to attach it to.
The land those troops stood on later became part of the Violet Bank and Oak Hill plantations, the same tracts a developer named T. Marshall Bellamy carved into a streetcar suburb in 1909, laid out along the Richmond to Petersburg interurban rail line that had opened a few years earlier. Bellamy named his subdivision for the same nickname the soldier had used more than a century before. That subdivision is what became the town in 1926, and the town is what turned 100 this year.
So the sequence runs: a nickname shouted across a river in 1781, a real estate development that borrowed the nickname in 1909, an incorporated town in 1926, and a centennial campaign in 2026 that's less interested in restaging that history at a single site than in letting it show up sideways, at a truck museum, in a park at sunset, at a stadium with a barbecue stand.
A City That Kept Choosing to Be Its Own Thing
There's a second thread running under all of this, and it's about independence rather than history. Colonial Heights spent its first 22 years as a town inside Chesterfield County before splitting off to become its own independent city in 1948, a status Virginia only grants to a handful of places and one that comes with full control over local governance and schools rather than sharing them with a surrounding county. The current charter, the one still in force, was granted in 1960.
That's twice now that this place has drawn its own boundary rather than accepting one drawn for it: once when Bellamy's streetcar suburb took a nickname and made it official, and once when the town decided it didn't want to be a subdivision of Chesterfield's decisions anymore. The CH100 approach, letting the year's celebration live in whatever a local business or park program is already doing rather than dictating a single official slate, fits that same instinct. Nobody had to ask permission to make their regular Thursday night at Fort Clifton mean something this year. It already did.
If you're weighing where that leaves you for the rest of 2026, the answer is simple: keep doing what you were already doing. Catch the next Sunset Series night if the schedule runs again before the weather turns. Watch for whatever the Keystone Truck & Tractor Museum plans for its off-season calendar. Check the CH100 tab on the city's website periodically, since local businesses are still adding their own tagged offers and events through the rest of the year. And when Violet Bank Museum reopens, that will be worth its own visit, not because the city built a birthday around it, but because it's the one address in Colonial Heights old enough to have earned the name before anyone made it official.
If you've been thinking about what it means to put down roots somewhere with this much layered identity, or you're weighing a move within Greater Richmond and want someone who already knows which addresses carry the real history, Michelle Johnson Fisher would love to talk it through. Let's Connect.
