Maymont is the backdrop of countless special moments in the lives of Richmond families. Many of us have memories of playing soccer or flag football on the big field near the Hampton Street entrance, trying to catch a glimpse of one of the bears in their habitat, reading a book under the shade of an oversized tree, listening to a band’s concert on the lawn, taking photos in the Japanese garden, chaperoning field trips, or watching the otters play in the Nature Center.
Aditi Singh, who moved to Richmond in 2009, vividly remembers her first visit to Maymont 13 years ago when her son was about to turn 1. “It was in April, and the weather was beautiful,” she says. “That was the first of many core memories spent at Maymont.” When her daughter was born three years later, Singh’s family celebrated with a picnic there for close friends and family members. Singh and her family still go to Maymont often, not only to commemorate important moments but also to enjoy the beautiful scenery on a quiet afternoon.
Henrico resident Micheline Gilbert took her daughter, Ava, to Maymont on her first birthday, nearly two decades ago. That’s where Ava ate ice cream for the first time. “She loved Maymont so much she would make me take her there on the weekends to see the farm animals and what she believed was her goat,” she says. “We had a lot of adventures there.”
Tina Kafantaris, a Richmond native who co-owns Joe’s Inn, remembers spending six hours at Maymont when her son was 3 years old. “He didn’t want to leave,” she shared through the park’s oral history project, Maymont Moments. “We pet the animals, saw the bears, and rolled down the hills. It was then, as it is now, a moment burned in my brain.” An ardent supporter of Maymont, Kafantaris has visited the park more times than she can count — from field trips when she was a kid to events she’s attended as an adult, including concerts, plant shows, and Maymont’s annual Garden Glow event. “Maymont is more than just a park,” she says. “It’s a crown jewel of the city.”
Maymont has helped mark the passage of time for generations of Richmonders, and spring 2026 marks Maymont’s own milestone: 100 years as a public park.
How It All Began
Maymont’s history begins in 1886, when financier James Dooley and his wife Sallie bought the land after stumbling upon it during a horseback ride. They built the 13,000 square foot, 33-room Maymont Mansion seven years later and spent the next several decades living there.
Born in Richmond to Irish immigrants, James Dooley grew up near the Virginia State Capitol. He attended Georgetown College (now known as Georgetown University) in Washington, D.C. and, after a stint in the Confederate Army, launched a legal career in Richmond. In 1869, he married Sallie, a native of nearby Staunton, Virginia. He went on to serve in the Virginia General Assembly from 1871 to 1877 and made his fortune from real estate, railroads, insurance, steel, and banking.
When the Dooleys occupied the mansion, they hosted glamorous parties attended by fellow successful businesspeople from Richmond and surrounding areas, according to Kathy Garrett-Cox, curator and director of historic resources and collections at Maymont. Many of the parties were written up in the newspapers, giving readers enough detail to imagine lavish, Gatsby-esque events.
There were also newspaper write-ups of the property’s Italian and Japanese gardens. “For 30 years, Richmonders had these little teasers of all these things that were happening,” says Garrett-Cox. “Mr. Dooley passed away in 1922, and it was announced on the front page that eventually Maymont would be a city-owned park and museum. So when Mrs. Dooley passed in 1925, and her will made it official, the city and its residents already knew it was going to happen. When we opened on Jan. 1, 1926, they just flocked in.”
During that first year, 55,000 people came to visit. “People were excited to see how the other half lived,” says Melissa Abernathy, communications manager at Maymont.
The Community Gets Involved
In its first few decades under city management, community members helped develop Maymont into what it is today — a large public park with a historic mansion, extensive gardens, a petting zoo, and wildlife habitats. “Richmonders could see the potential in Maymont very early on,” says Garrett-Cox.
In 1927, the James River Garden Club got involved, marking the trees and shrubs to identify and keep track of what plants grew on the property. Then in 1937, the Richmond Rose Society planted roses in the Italian Garden.
In 1945, William B. Thalhimer, a local retail executive and philanthropist, started lobbying for wildlife exhibits on the property to educate visitors. Community members supported the initiative, and together, they developed an agreement with the city to help bring it about. The first wildlife exhibit opened in 1959, and 223,000 people visited that year. The first children’s farm was completed a year later, and in 1963, a new wildlife habitat opened featuring two American bison, May and Monty.
Around that time, the Maymont Nature Center Association, a conglomerate of local garden clubs, worked to preserve the gardens and the trees. They also converted the Stone Barn, one of the Dooley’s original structures, into a nature center showcasing the plants found on the park’s 100 acres. It wasn’t like the nature center at Maymont today, notes Garrett-Cox, which houses river otters, turtles, fish, and reptiles rather than plants.
The grassroots organizations that enhanced Maymont did so in a very Richmond way, according to Abernathy. “They didn’t impact the historic nature of the property,” she says. “You can walk through the gate and feel like you’re walking back in time. You still feel like you’re on the Dooleys’ estate.” Even today, most of the paved paths mirror the original pathways the Dooleys carved in the grounds.
That desire to maintain the historic nature of Maymont was never more salient than in 1970 when the community cametogether again to help preserve the former estate. They were motivated in large part by a Richmond Times-Dispatch article that described Maymont as the “city’s albatross” because the house was in such disrepair. “As anybody who owns a historic building knows, it wants to fall down just from looking at it,” Garrett-Cox says.
By that time, the mansion didn’t have working heat, so they had stopped giving tours during the winter. The main roof had been replaced in 1961, but there are five ancillary roofs that continued to leak. “By the time the article came out,” Garrett-Cox says, “there were falling ceilings and deteriorating ceilings, and the furniture and objects were suffering.” The city dedicated resources to the mansion’s repair, and community members, including VCU students and local designers, came together to clean and paint the interior.
There was still more work to be done.
As the Richmond Times-Dispatch article revealed, maintaining a historic mansion, extensive gardens, and wildlife habitats was a lot for the city and volunteer groups to manage. But they weren’t ready to let go of the space they’d invested so much time and so many resources in. The ideal solution was to develop the Maymont Foundation, which took over responsibility for operating and maintaining the park in 1975. Several of the founding members were community volunteers who had helped preserve the gardens and bring about the wildlife habitats. The Foundation signed an agreement with the city that they wouldn’t charge admission for visitors.
“A nonprofit is a good way to channel that fundraising and care. The public/private partnerships that developed, especially at that time, allowed private entities to do more fundraising than a city or state can do,” says Abernathy.
A Modern Maymont
With the Foundation in place, Maymont continued to improve and grow.
In 1976, Elisabeth Scott Bocock, the daughter of Fred Scott, one of Dooley’s business associates, offered her collection of antique carriages to Maymont. It’s now housed in the Dooleys’ Carriage House. Also that year, the renovated nature center, still located in the Stone Barn at that time, shifted its focus from plants to animals, with support from local philanthropist Mary Morton Parsons. In the next several years, restoration began for the Japanese and Italian gardens.
In 1982, a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Charles Thalhimer led to the new Children’s Farm near the Spottswood Road entrance. In 1999, the new Robins Nature and Visitor Center opened, named for philanthropist E. Claiborne Robins, a life trustee of the Maymont Foundation. The new center gave Maymont more classroom space to host school field trips. “During the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, education programs were at a modest level. When the Children’s Farm and then the Nature Center were built, they expanded the classroom space,” Garrett-Cox says. “That’s important because we know that if we’re able to captivate students on a school visit, they’ll visit Maymont for the rest of their lives.” Those new facilities also provided rental spaces for birthday parties, weddings, and other special events — an important source of revenue that helps sustain Maymont.
More recently, Maymont has completed renovations as part of Maymont 2025, an $11.75 million project in honor of the park’s 100th anniversary, enhancing some of its features and the visitor experience. These renovations included an updating of the Virginia Wildlife Trail — the first holistic upgrade of the wildlife habitats in almost 50 years according to Garrett-Cox — with new signage, expanded walkways, and additional space for animal viewing and environmental education programs. The Maymont Mansion was also updated to include structural improvements like a restored roof and an upgraded climate control system.
Visitors can also enjoy the grand reopening of the Wildlife Trail and see two new species. Porcupines, now in the nursery at the Robins Nature Center, will have their own outdoor habitat, and the park is introducing coyotes. “A lot of Richmonders may be seeing coyotes [in their neighborhoods or in the woods], so we want to give some education around how we can learn to live with them in our world,” Garrett-Cox says.
Few parks in the United States have all that Maymont has to offer: a historic home, elaborate gardens, farm animals, and wildlife habitats. Maymont is a unique public space that grew out of the interests of different groups of Richmonders. “Visitors to Maymont can see what Richmond really cares about — nature, beauty, great landscape design, and history — all in one place,” Abernathy says.
The park has become especially meaningful to the Richmond community, not only because of its uniqueness but also because of the way it marks so many resonant moments in our lives — the extraordinary moments, like a wedding, quinceanera, or a birthday, and the ordinary moments, like a stroll through the gardens, an afternoon feeding the goats, or a gathering of friends.
Last year, 11 years after Aditi Singh hosted a picnic to celebrate her daughter’s birth, her daughter attended a friend’s birthday party at Maymont. After dropping her off, Singh, her husband, and her in-laws enjoyed time in the park. “It felt like a full-circle moment,” she says.
