Must-See RVA! — Pettit & Company

1 East Broad Street
Built, circa 1880s

Before Heilig Meyers, before The Dump, there was Pettit & Company.

[RVCJ03] — W. S. Pettit

Population considered, the Furniture Business of Richmond is relatively large; furniture and house furnishings together, in fact, form one of the most substantial trade lines. Big and little, all counted, there are between fifteen and twenty houses engaged in the trade. Of these, however, perhaps five or six have distinction.

(Chronicling America) — Pettit & Company Times-Dispatch advertisement, enabling your desire to amass credit debt — Saturday, 16 January 1904

One or two of these make a display rivaling those of the show rooms of New York and Chicago. An authority declares that the furniture trade here has more than doubled in the last eight or ten }-ears and that this expansion is still going forward. Here, as in all the larger cities, the trade has come to be one largely of installment credit methods. About eighty per cent, of the sales are made to local customers; the remainder to out of town buyers, largely in the immediate vicinity of the city.

(Chronicling America) — Pettit & Company Times-Dispatch advertisement, romantically suggesting (wink, wink) a new mattress for Valentine’s Day, because, um, you know — Sunday, 11 February 1912

The trade handles nearly every kind and degree of house furnishings. Their stock embraces, besides the regular line of furniture and carpets, floor coverings of all kinds, draperies, lamps, refrigerators and kitchen fittings, and in some cases also stoves and kitchen utensils. Medium and low grade wares and goods of this line find the readiest sale, but as we have intimated, one or two houses handle the very finest goods.

(Chronicling America) — Pettit & Company Times-Dispatch advertisement, for the Prince Alladin in all of us — Sunday, 7 November 1909

The manufacture of furniture is carried on principally in Manchester. The city work of this character is mainly the making of couches. The whole amount made here and in the sister city is scarcely more than $150,000 a year. The factory product is a small item in the trade. In the main the furniture handled comes from all parts of the country, much of it from the great cheap furniture center of Grand Rapids, from Chicago and New York. North Carolina and other Southern States are beginning to figure in the factory output of the country, although at present their output is of rather ordinary grade.

August 2018

There is little information on the demise of the company, although it’s not hard to imagine them on the losing side of a war against Miller & Rhoads and Thalhimers. Happily, the building still survives, still sporting iron rosettes, Romanesque arched windows, and beautiful brick corbelling. At least along the Foushee Street side.

August 2018

It’s a little harder to discern the architectural finery from Broad Street, hobbled as the view is by the Insidious Tree-Architecture Conspiracy. Who seeing this can deny that trees in this city are bent on a path of architectural vandalism? Sadly the former Pettit & Company building is also missing the distinguishing touches of the original parapet with finials, lantern, and flagpost, and we must be satisfied with the thin end of the wedge.

(Pettit & Company is part of the Atlas RVA Project)

Sources

• [RVCJ03] Richmond, Virginia: The City on the James: The Book of Its Chamber of Commerce and Principal Business Interests. G. W. Engelhardt. 1903.

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