James A. Fields House

James Apostle Fields was born enslaved in Hanover County in 1844, and he learned the law watching attorneys at the courthouse while he tended their horses. A brutal beating sent him fleeing during the Civil War; he joined his escaped family behind Union lines at Hampton, enrolled in Hampton Institute's first class in 1869, graduated two years later, and took a Howard law degree in 1882. In between he served as a justice of the peace — in 1879, Virginia's first Black judicial officer — then Commonwealth's Attorney for Warwick County, and in 1889 a seat in the House of Delegates: the man born a slave prosecuting cases and making laws in the state that had owned him.

The brick Italianate at 617 27th Street was his 1897 home and law office — one of at least twenty-five properties he held at his death from Bright's disease in 1903. The house kept serving the community he built: in 1908 four Black doctors pooled their savings and used its top floor to found the Whittaker Memorial Hospital — the first hospital for Black residents of Newport News, in the home of the man who had been the county's first Black prosecutor.

The house is on the National Register and restored as a museum — the Italianate on 27th Street where the arc ran from enslaved stable boy to the bar, the bench, the legislature, and the hospital that followed.

The James A. Fields House is the archive's self-made file — the home and office of the man who escaped slavery, became Virginia's first Black judicial officer, and left a house that became the city's first Black hospital.