Must-See RVA! — Scott-Clarke House

9 South Fifth Street
Built, 1841
January 2020

Home to an entertaining talker.

[HOR]

The dwelling generally called the Clarke house was built in 1841 by James Scott. The executors of John Allan’s estate had sold Scott the quarter-square that had once been part of the garden of “Moldavia,” and James Scott sold the corner at Cary Street to William Barret and built his own home just south of the Allan house. Scott was one of the tobacconists who gravitated to Fifth Street in the ’forties. Born in Scotland in 1773, he had emigrated to Virginia in 1798, first settling in Manchester, where he was in the tobacco export business. He married the daughter of Archibald Freeland.

[HOR]

For about twenty years he lived in Freeland’s house on what is now Bainbridge Street. Mr. Scott died in 1861. His wife continued until her death in 1876 to live in their Fifth Street house with her daughter Ellen, who had married Captain Maxwell T. Clarke.

January 2020

Apparently Captain Clarke was a great favorite, and his name is that most identified with the house in the minds of older Richmonders. He had served in both the army and the navy of the Confederacy and for many years was in the leaf tobacco business with his brother-in-law James A. Scott, under the firm name of Scott and Clarke.

[RVCJ03] — R. L. Christian & Co. at 816 East Main Street, circa 1903

In later years he was assistant cashier of R. L. Christian and Co. Mr. Munford describes Captain Clarke as “erect, of patrician appearance, and a most entertaining talker.” An elder of the nearby Second Presbyterian Church, he was buried from there when he died at eighty-one in 1911.

January 2020

The house had been sold in 1897 and has since passed through many hands. In appearance it is a curious compromise between the problem “to stucco or not to stucco,” which every builder in the ’forties must have faced. The Clarke house was not stuccoed, but was painted a light color, now partly worn off and not unattractive. It has a belt-course as well as window sills and a porch of granite. The rear porch has square pillars, the entrance porch Doric columns.

January 2020

Inside, the arrangement is similar to that of the Bransford house—a square entrance hall, the stair to the left, and two rooms across the back. The trim is much less elaborate, and the mantels are for the most part of wood.

January 2020

Today, the old house is leased as office space, a nice retirement gig for a 179-year-old house. Currently, it’s the home of Canal Capital Management.

(Scott-Clarke House is part of the Atlas RVA! Project)

Print Sources

• [HOR] Houses of Old Richmond. Mary Wingfield Scott. 1941.
• [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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