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- Town
22,500
47%
$43,262
12.9%
America/New_York
23860
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Hopewell, VA - History
We would like to provide the residents of Hopewell a basic history overview.
Welcome to the Hopewell Home page. The Hopewell Home page provides as much information as possible on Hopewell. Knowing Hopewell’s history is essential to guiding its future. Within Hopewell’s Home page, you will also find Hopewell’s Founders, Holiday, and Birthday sections.
Hopewell has a population of 22500. 45.9% of Hopewell’s inhabitants are Male, and 54.1 are female. 41.9% of Hopewell is married and 47.1% own their own home. The Average Home price is $126,067, and the average rent is $920. Household median income in Hopewell is $43,262, and the individual median income is $26,794. Hopewell’s Ethnic is the following: White(50%), Black(43.2%), Hispanic(8.4%), Multiple(3.4%), Other(2%), Asian(1.4%), Native(0.1%).
The Federal Correctional Complex, Petersburg (FCC Petersburg), two federal prisons which house 3400 inmates, are located just outside the Hopewell city limits, in Prince George CountyIn 1977, Hopewell again made the national news due to another accident involving a drawbridge when the tanker S.S. Marine Floridian outbound under the command of a James River pilot suffered a steering malfunction just after dawn on February 24 that caused it to veer out of the channel and hit the Benjamin Harrison Memorial Bridge just east of town.
The accident caused serious damage to the bridge and it was closed for months. In 1983, Hopewell again received negative publicity from the national news media when it was discovered that Evelyn Rust Wells, an elderly woman, had been held captive and terrorized in her home in the City Point section.
Her captors, mostly male teenagers under 18, cashed her Social Security checks at local grocery stores. A local grocer noted a change in purchases from when neighborhood kids assisted Wells, and called the police. They investigated and freed Wells who was by then severely malnourished.Although still an important industrial city, Hopewell has struggled with transitions through loss of jobs due to plant closures, changes in residential housing patterns, and the costs of environmental clean-up.
Much of its middle class population moved to neighboring Prince George and Chesterfield Counties for newer housing during the suburban expansion of the 1960s and 1970s. The city's housing stock is dominated by relatively small homes with a significant percentage being offered as rental properties. Of these, many were hastily constructed over a century ago by DuPont to house plant workers during the First World War. Hopewell has encouraged re-development along its waterfront areas along the James and Appomattox Rivers, in the downtown area, and the City Point Historic District, as well as the sites of several long vacant industrial plants.
Due to its hasty construction as a mill town during the First World War, Hopewell had a large number of kit homes that were hauled in and erected in neighborhoods laid out by DuPont known as "A Village" and "B Village". The city has a surviving group of Sears Catalog Homes, with several available for exterior viewing on a self-guided tour.
The city also has numerous Aladdin Kit Homes; at one time, it may have had the most such homes in the nation. Because residents moved to newer houses and the Aladdin Homes were abandoned and deteriorated, many have been razed.Hopewell has struggled with high rates of violent crime. In September 2010, a series of explosions occurred at a controversial new ethanol plant that had recently been constructed on a long vacant site formerly occupied by a Firestone plant.
In 2007, former Hopewell Mayor and civil rights leader Curtis W. Harris, had marched against the proposed ethanol plant being built in Hopewell with support from the national Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The plant had not yet become fully operational when the explosions occurred. There was no loss of life due to the accident but shortly after the explosion Osage BioEnergy, the owners of the $150 million facility, announced that the plant was for sale.
Although the facility was sitting idle through 2013 with the city of Hopewell taking legal action to recoup unpaid taxes on the property, the facility was eventually purchased by another firm and operations were restarted in 2014. In 2015 the troubled ethanol plant closed again for a second time after less than a year in operation with its owners citing a lack of profitability as the reason for the shutdown.
The plant has since been purchased and re-opened by Green Plains Inc. of Omaha, Nebraska. Hopewell has come to the attention of AAA because some of its members have complained that Hopewell is a speed trap for its practice of citing drivers for speeding along a 1.7 mile stretch of Interstate 295, nicknamed the "Million Dollar Mile" by disgruntled drivers.
AAA, claimed in a press release that Hopewell employs 11 sheriff's deputies working in 14-hour shifts to patrol less than two miles of the highway that lie within the city limits of Hopewell. However, this statistic has been denied by the sheriff of Hopewell, who was baffled as to where that information was generated as he said the deputies working on I-295 only work eight-hour shifts.
This practice, which it has been claimed, annually generated $1.8 million in revenue from speeding tickets, of which 75% were issued to out of state drivers, triggered a court clash between the Commonwealth's Attorney and the city prosecutor, and elicited an official ruling from the Attorney General of Virginia.
Sheriff Luther Sodat said that the almost two-mile stretch of highway "is a safety issue for Hopewell." Virginia's urban interstates have a fatality rate about one-third the Statewide rate for all roads combined.
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