by Greg Wells
OHNA Newsletter, Summer 2002

The William Byrd Community House has grown alongside the Oregon Hill community and nurtured its development. It all began with the vision of tobacco heiress Grace Arents, who took an interest in helping out the residents of Oregon Hill during the last fifty years of her life. In 1894, Arents helped establish the city’s first free library at 230 South Laurel Street. Fourteen years later, in 1908, the brick two story that stands today at 224 South Cherry Street was opened for business as the Arents Free Library.

The agency known today as the WBCH was founded in 1900 with a mission of serving the poor in Richmond’s inner city. The agency moved from one location to another before settling at the former site of the Arents Free Library in 1947. During its first couple of decades on Cherry Street, children of the hill spent long hours at the center playing board games, taking boxing lessons and playing baseball in the neighboring lot. It was the place where many hillers spent their free time, said one resident in a 1976 Times Dispatch article.

In the early 1970s, the former Reverend Jody McWilliams took over as the center’s new executive director. McWilliams immediately became entrenched in the neighborhood, helping establish the Oregon Hill Home Improvement Council and playing a key role in dispelling neighborhood misconceptions that everyone on the hill was poor and on welfare. He let the center be used frequently for community meetings to address issues, such as the battle with VCU over encroachment. The director also expanded the center’s area over the years to cover other neighborhoods including Randolph, Maymont, Carver, and the Main and Cary street corridors. Thirty years later, McWilliams is still the executive director of the non-profit agency. Today’s WBCH houses departments that work with youth, families, low income individuals, community development, the elderly and more in their ongoing effort to build healthy families and communities.