Moseley is an

unincorporated area An unincorporated area is a parcel of land that is not governed by a local general-purpose municipal corporation. (At p. 178.) They may be governed or serviced by an encompassing unit (such as a county) or another branch of the state (such as th ...

Powhatan Powhatan people () are Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands who belong to member tribes of the Powhatan Confederacy, or Tsenacommacah. They are Algonquian peoples whose historic territories were in eastern Virginia. Their Powh ...

and Chesterfield counties in the

U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its so ...

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States between the East Coast of the United States ...

. It is located to the west of the metropolitan Richmond area. The

United States Post Office The United States Postal Service (USPS), also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or simply the Postal Service, is an independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government responsible for providing postal serv ...

for the community is located at 21431 Hull Street Road, with a ZIP code of 23120. The community still has farms, some of which have established tourist activities such as pick-your-own-fruits and -vegetables and seasonal events. The privately owned Metro Richmond Zoo is located here and has operated year round on its 70-acre facility since 1995. (It was closed for a period during the early stages of the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

.) Many upper-middle class communities have been built in this formerly rural area since the late 20th century, such as Magnolia Green, Summer Lake, Westerleigh and FoxFire. It is bordered to the east by the

census-designated place A census-designated place (CDP) is a Place (United States Census Bureau), concentration of population defined by the United States Census Bureau for statistical purposes only. CDPs have been used in each decennial census since 1980 as the counte ...

of Woodlake.

History

The community was named for William Moseley, a major landowner who donated property in the late 19th century for a railroad station. It developed as a stop on the

Farmville and Powhatan Railroad In 1886, Randolph Harrison, of the Virginia department of Agriculture, cited Cumberland Mining Company, stating that businessmen would soon open a hotel at Lithia Springs, Farmville, VA for people seeking the healing waters. The Brighthope railway ...

from 1891 to 1905, and then on the Tidewater and Western Railroad from 1905 to 1917. It was also a stop on the

Richmond and Danville Railroad The Richmond and Danville Railroad (R&D) Company was a railroad that operated independently from 1847 until 1894, first in the U.S. state of Virginia, and later on of track in nine states. Chartered on March 9, 1847, the railroad completed its ...

, which was renamed as the

Southern Railway (U.S.) The Southern Railway (also known as Southern Railway Company; ) was a class 1 railroad based in the Southern United States between 1894 and 1982, at which time it merged with the Norfolk and Western Railway (N&W) to form the Norfolk Southern R ...

. It was absorbed by the

Norfolk Southern Railway The Norfolk Southern Railway is a Class I freight railroad operating in the Eastern United States. Headquartered in Atlanta, the company was formed in 1982 with the merger of the Norfolk and Western Railway and Southern Railway. The comp ...

in 1982, which no longer stops in Moseley. In the late 1800s some people would transfer between the two railroads here, although they had separate stations. In 1891 the train did not always stop. Staff used a railroad car on the

, to drop off and pick up mail using the Mail on-the-fly technique. (This car was not designated as a

railway post office In Canada and the United States, a railway post office, commonly abbreviated as RPO, was a railroad car that was normally operated in passenger service and used specifically for staff to sort mail en route, in order to speed delivery. The RPO w ...

. This hook and pouch system allowed crew on the train to drop off and pick up mail without the train slowing. The area was long devoted to agriculture. In the colonial period, tobacco was a commodity crop, a labor-intensive crop that planters cultivated and processed with the use of enslaved African-American workers. Soils became exhausted and mixed crops were introduced in the late 18th and 19th centuries. In addition to large lot suburban development, it is the site of the privately owned Metro Richmond Zoo. This has national certification.

References

External links

Chesterfield Berry Farm & Market websiteMetro Richmond Zoo website
Unincorporated communities in Powhatan County, Virginia Unincorporated communities in Chesterfield County, Virginia Unincorporated communities in Virginia {{PowhatanCountyVA-geo-stub