Petersburg, Hopewell, & City Point Railway 1907 Stephenson car #106 caught somewhere in downtown Petersburg, Virginia. The date is 1935 and the Petersburg, Hopewell, & City Point has only three more years left until total liquidation. On this section of Then & Now, we will take a look at the above photograph and how the same area compares today. I will go through the process of finding the exact location including identifying definite landmarks and roads. I hope you enjoy this voyage into Virginia history.

Step one to finding the exact location of a shot is to study the route of the railway itself. Unfortunately, information relating to this electric interurban is sparse so I had to do some digging just to find this piece of info. Reading this article, one can see that the line terminated at the corner of Wythe Street and Sycamore Street in Petersburg. That would be a good starting point as that location would probably be one of the busiest portions of the railway.

However, notice how this modern day satellite image of the same location shows no church at the intersection of Wythe and Sycamore. In fact, the whole road design has changed! Instead of Wythe street ending at the intersection, the road now crosses over Sycamore heading further west. To allow with the expansion of Wythe, the old church must have been demolished. Now all that's left is Church's Chicken; possibly an ode to the religious structure that once stood near that same spot?