Two Noted Homes

South Market Street became a fashionable address for Petersburg’s elite in the mid-19th century. Two blocks south of here is the Thomas Wallace house, built in 1855, which served as Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s headquarters after the fall of Petersburg in April 1865. Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s last meeting with Grant took place there on 3 April, shortly before Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on 9 April and Lincoln’s death six days later. Half a block south of here stood the primary post-Civil War residence of William Mahone, a Confederate major general, railroad tycoon, U.S. senator, and leader of Virginia’s biracial Readjuster Party, which won control of the General Assembly in 1879.