Stretching four blocks, the Hermitage Road Historic District centers on a wide thoroughfare situated northwest of Richmond’s central business district and just south of the Henrico County line. The district developed between the late 1800s and early 1900s, starting as an enclave of elegant country estates and evolving into a middle- to upper-class neighborhood on the Lakeside Streetcar Line, one of many electric rail lines that served Richmond and its suburbs. Tobacco magnate Lewis Ginter, a major real estate investor in the city’s Northside, funded the Lakeside line to develop his holdings, which included the Lakeside Zoo and Wheel Club, the site today of the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. Early developers touted homes offering electric, telephone, and sewage connections as well as an ample supply of pure water from local artesian wells. Residential architecture accounts for the majority of the district’s properties, revealing both high-style and more modest dwellings of Late Victorian, Colonial Revival, and American styles. The district’s roads are wide and tree-lined, giving it a spacious, park-like feel. Lot sizes are large and many deeds had set-back covenants. In 1914, Richmond appropriated 12.21 square miles of Northside from Henrico County, including the current Hermitage district, the city’s largest annexation. Today the Hermitage Road Historic District remains residential.