Sometime in the early 1900s, if you turned off 2nd Street onto East Leigh in Richmond’s Jackson Ward, you would have left the bustle of the neighborhood’s Black Wall Street and entered the quieter residential block known as Quality Row.
A block or so in, sat a two-story brick rowhouse with a front porch and bay windows. A woman lived there who had grown up the daughter of a laundress. Later, she founded the first bank in the United States ever chartered by a woman.
She then spent three decades remaking the house around her expanding life, adding electricity, central heating, a library, and new rooms by enlarging the house…