Black Heath was a house and coal mine located near the present day Midlothian area of Chesterfield County, Virginia. The Black Heath coal mining enterprises were operated intermittently from the early 1780s until 1939 and were most notably run by the Heth family from 1795 until 1840, who also built the mansion house in the early 1800s. During the early tenure of the Heths' operation, the Black Heath mines were one of the largest producers of coal in the United States and supplied coal to the White House during US President Thomas Jefferson's term. In 1840, control shifted to an English group of investors who oversaw the mines at a distance until 1888, when they were sold to another interest which soon went into trusteeship. During the 1910s or 1920s, the Black Heath house collapsed due to severe undermining from the numerous coal shafts and tunnels scattered around the property. In 1938, the Black Heath land was sold to coal mining interests who soon went into trusteeship and default like many others before them. Over the next few decades, the land sat idle until 1971, when it began to be parceled off into housing developments.
House and land The mansion of Black Heath was large and grand and in its early days said to have been "surrounded by all the appurtenances of a home of wealth and taste." The house had four distinct sections arranged in an "L" shape. The leftmost section was three bays wide, 1.5 stories tall, and had a gable roof. The next section was the main section of Black Heath, as it was the largest and the only one built of brick (the rest being made of frame wood), and was 6 bays wide, 2 stories tall, had a hipped roof, and had a unique central chimney. The next section was three bays wide, two stories tall, meshed into the rear of the house on the right side, and had a gambrel roof. The fourth and last section was probably two bays wide, one story tall, and had a gable roof. The mix of three types of roofs (gable, hipped, and gambrel) seems odd but was not unseen in Virginia. For example, the Byrd family plantation house, Westover, has these three roof types as well. The grounds were beautifully managed in the Heth era and had various features such as a flower garden, an oak grove, a circular brick dovecote, stables, a barn, and other outbuildings.
The house was built near the brink of a steep cliff which rose about 50 feet from a creek that had its mouth at Falling Creek half a mile away. The tract of Black Heath was near where coal was first discovered in North America in 1701 five miles northwest at Manakintowne in modern-day Powhatan County. During Harry Heth's ownership of Black Heath, he sank a number of shafts on the property, one of which is supposed to have been the foundation for the eponymous pond which existed on the property from at least the 1860s until the late 1980s and was located within 400 to 500 feet south of the house. The origin of the name "Black Heath" is not fully known. It was most likely due to either of the following reasons: 1) it was derived from the color of coal and the Heth family name, or 2) Harry Heth's family had English roots and so the name could have been related to Blackheath near London. The acreage size of the tract of Black Heath was reported at various sizes throughout the years, being 97 acres in the 1760s to 1770s, 99.5 acres in the early 1800s, 99 acres in the later 1800s, and 98.7 acres in 1938 when it was split into two tracts of 82.1 and 16.6 acres each.
History 1705–1795 The land on which Black Heath was built was originally part of a land grant to John Tullitt made by the Crown on November 2, 1705. He received 17,653 acres of land in Henrico County south of the James River (in what is today Chesterfield County) for sponsoring the passage of 353 settlers (at a rate of 50 acres per person). These settlers may have been Huguenot refugees, many of whom later settled in an area known as Manakintown northwest of Tullit's land grant. This vast tract of land, although recorded as having 17,653 acres, actually had at least 27,500 acres based on the locations of the survey posts and lines seen from satellite imagery today. When Hannah Brummall Tullitt, the widow of John Tullitt, died in 1737, she left land near Falling Creek with coal pits to her brother John's children. John Brummall was the great-grandfather of Elijah Brummall, a local coal mine owner in the early 1800s and the owner of Aetna Hill, a house built in 1791 that was 0.7 miles southwest of Black Heath.
It is unknown who the land on which Black Heath stood immediately passed to after John Tullit's ownership, but it later was part of a 497-acre tract owned by Colonel John Bolling. Before 1749, Bolling sold this tract to Andrew Ammonett, a Huguenot himself who had traveled to Virginia as a young boy with his family. Ammonett married Jane Morrisett, daughter of Pierre Morrisett and Elizabeth Faure, and together they had nine children: Charles, John, William, Jacob, Andrew, Judith, Jane, Elizabeth, and Magdalene. In Ammonett's will, dated September 2, 1761, he divided up his plantation between his five sons with John receiving 97 acres and William, Jacob, Andrew, and Charles each receiving 100 acres. John's tract of 97 acres was bounded by "the lines of George Sowell and Joshua Trabue" and later became known as the "Black Heath" tract during Harry Heth's ownership.
In December 1778, John Ammonett sold this tract to the same George Sowell who owned land that adjoined it. Sowell was also listed as a witness in Andrew Ammonett's will. Shortly thereafter, however, Sowell died. The following month, January 1779, George Sowell's widow, Mary; his son, Thomas; and Thomas' wife, Anne; sold the 97-acre tract to William Ronald of neighboring Powhatan County for £16,005, with £16,000 going to Thomas and Anne and £5 going to Mary. The land being transferred contains this interesting description: "with all [illegible] the mines, minerals, quarries, coalpits or coal which therein lieth or which at any point heretofore hath been, or hereafter shall and may be found or discovered therein or in any part thereof." Ronald did not intend to live on the tract, as his main plantation was in Powhatan, but rather desired to raise coal from it. He did so for about a decade but his finances were at such a state in 1788 that he had to mortgage the land (then estimated at 99.5 acres) for £1,090 and 10 shillings. In 1793, Ronald died, and a suit was brought by Samuel Swann, who held the mortgage on the land, against William Bentley, Ronald's administrator, to either pay the mortgage money or sell the land. A decree was delivered in 1795 which stated that the land must be sold by a certain unless the money was paid and accordingly, the land was bought by Henry "Harry" Heth and John Stewart, partners in a firm known as Heth and Stewart instituted in 1786. They paid 3,150 pounds for the tract, of which 1,486 pounds, 1 shilling, and 4 pence were paid to Samuel Swann and 1,663 pounds, 18 shillings, and 8 pence to William Bentley. Soon after, Heth and Stewart began raising coal. Stewart exited the business by 1797, leaving Heth as the sole owner of the land. The first time the name "Black Heath" was mentioned was in 1800, when James Ping was hired as the manager of the coal pits.
1795–1850 The Black Heath house, or at least the majority of it, was presumably built after Heth bought the land in 1796. Before then, Heth had primarily lived in Richmond and Manchester and perhaps desired to live and raise his growing family in a more rural setting. It is also possible that the house was built in sections, as there are four distinct sections of the house. As a result of his successful coal mine operations, Heth became very wealthy. Although his family had immigrated to America relatively recently in the middle of the 18th century, Heth's children married people with historic Virginia names of Randolph, Harrison, and Pickett. At the end of his life, he owned numerous plantations, including Black Heath, Curles, and Norwood and made provisions in his will for each of his four daughters to receive $10,000 each.Roughly equivalent to $262,000 each in 2022, https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1821?amount=10000
In January 1821, Harry Heth died of consumption in Savannah, Georgia, where he had arrived after a stay in Europe for the improvement of his health. In his will, Heth gave the Black Heath house and surface land to his eldest son, Henry. The subsurface land was willed to the co partnership consisting of Harry's three sons, Henry, John, and Beverly, and his son in law, Beverly Randolph. This partnership was set up to continue the Heth family coal business. Henry Heth was born in 1793/4 in Richmond. Not much is known about his life, except that he married Eliza Ann Cunliffe, the daughter of a neighboring coal mine owner named John Cunliffe (1758–1824), on January 4, 1815, in Chesterfield County, most likely at Black Heath. During the War of 1812, Henry served as a sergeant major under his father in the 1st Regiment (Heth's) Cavalry, Virginia Militia. After the war, Henry probably came to help his father in the coal business and in the 1820 US Census he is recorded as having 44 male slaves and 4 female slaves. In 1821, his father, Harry, died and Henry inherited the plantation Black Heath. He lived there until he also died, four years later, in January 1825. In his will, Henry left everything he owned to his wife, Eliza. She later married an influential Richmond businessman named Holden Rhodes in 1833 and moved to an estate which was later developed into Forest Hill Park.
It is not entirely clear how the Black Heath house passed from Eliza Heth to her brother-in-law, John Heth, but by any measure, John and his wife Margaret were living at Black Heath in December 1825 when their third child and first son, another Henry Heth, was born. John Heth had been a midshipman in the United States Navy during the War of 1812 but resigned in 1822 to marry Margaret Pickett and take a more active role within the family coal business. John had eleven children with Margaret between 1823 and 1842, including the afore mentioned Henry Heth, who graduated from West Point in 1847 and served as a Confederate Major General during the Civil War.
In 1833, John Heth incorporated the Black Heath Company of Colliers with his brother, Beverley Heth, and brother-in-law, Robert Beverley Randolph. This company was the first incorporated coal mining company in the state of Virginia. Included in its assets By 1840, John owned most of the three thousand shares of stock and went to England to advertise for a new company to English investors. This new company was formed in 1841 and was called the Chesterfield Coal and Iron Mining Company (locally known as the "English Company"). Unfortunately, after returning from England in 1842, John Heth died at Norwood Plantation on April 30. He left his wife and 10 young children with ages varying between 19 years and one month. Major General Henry Heth, John Heth's third child and eldest son, wrote later in his life that the period after his father's death was "the most severe calamity I had ever felt." When 17-year-old Henry reported to the military academy at West Point in 1842, he described his family as "badly off" and in "reduced circumstances." John Heth's widow Margaret continued living at Black Heath until she died in 1850, around which point A. F. D. Gifford took up residence in the house.
1850–present