Memorial Day has come again to the Fredericksburg area. Over the long weekend there will be special programs and commemorative events. The most spectacular presentation will be Saturday’s annual lighting of the luminary at the National Cemetery on Willis Hill, above the Sunken Road. It is a touching secular service to say the least, more so when the spectator fully appreciates what each of the burning candles represents. This Monday will be one of the rare occasions when the “Memorial Day Monday” actually falls on the originally intended date for the observance, May 30. The first Memorial Day…

Local history buffs owe it to themselves to check out John Hennessy's nascent series on how Fredericksburg voted to secede from the United States in the opening months of the Civil War. Writing in the first rate local history blog Fredericksburg Remembered, Hennessy's first post in the two part series takes us to the day of the vote, May 23, 1861 and examines the scene outside of the Fredericksburg Courthouse on Princess Anne Street (the same one city leaders are thinking about replacing). It tells the story of former 5th Circuit Court Judge John Tayloe Lomax, 80 at the time of the vote, and …

I derived the headline for this installment by paraphrasing a New York Times editorial, dated October 20, 1862. The unnamed author of that piece was covering the macabre success of a photographic exhibition at the New York Gallery of Mathew Brady, entitled “The Dead of Antietam.” Struck by the allure and immediate popularity of the exhibit he opined, “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along streets, he has done something very like it.” Brady is the man popular history …

One of our most recognizable tourist souvenirs is the postcard. Practically anyplace where history minded travelers will congregate one can find a modest selection of picture postcards available for sale. Inexpensive, and easily dropped in a local mail box before leaving town, souvenir postcards have been around for more than a century in the United States. Their origin is a bit of history in itself. Popularized during the “fin de siècle” era in France, the American roots derive from the May 19, 1898 Private Mailing Card Act. Prior to that date, the United States Post Office had been the only…

     Eighteen months of concentrated strife left an indelible mark on the landscape and psyche of Spotsylvania County. It began with a hurried exodus from Fredericksburg prior to the December 1862 battle that ravaged the town, and culminated in the late days of May 1864, when the warring armies finally left a desolate countryside. The citizenry had suffered immeasurably. The aftermath of not only four major military engagements but also the provisioning of both friend and foe throughout, etched a deep scar of resentment. For many, it would not be as simple as picking up the pieces and …

With the passage of a century and a half, those of us who can claim ancestry that fought in the Civil War often find divergent threads of family lineage which underscore the patchwork fabric of American history. I warmly embrace the fact that my family story contains men who fought on both sides, as it were. Not in the classic “brother’s war” sense that has characterized the conflict and the reunion of the once divided nation, but rather by virtue of the passage of time and the nature of the nation’s growth and expansion following the war. Prior to the 1860s the majority of people who settled…

     By June of 2006, three years after the final negotiation to acquire the land, the Spotsylvania County government had begun to break ground and commence construction of the new Company 1 Fire & Rescue Station on Route 208. Situated roughly 350 yards northeast of the entrance to the Spotsylvania Confederate Cemetery, the site had been designated in previous versions of the county comprehensive plan as a set aside for green space, or a local serving public park. Its relationship on the landscape, within the entrance corridor to the Historic Village Planning Area, warranted the designation…

     The Block House Road and Brock Road intersect on a slight elevation overlooking the undulating fields of the Spindle farm. A quarter mile further to the north, the Brock Road split like a pair of legs to envelope the eastern reaches of the Alsop farm in a long polygon extending toward Gordon Road. At the lower split, the Union 6th Corps dug in on the evening of May 8th, 1864, building a barrier of rifle pits flanking a battery of cannon, and linking arms with the 5th Corps’ left flank. From either end of the Spindle farm, the intervening ground had become untenable, leaving a no man’s …

Any traveler heading into the Spotsylvania Courthouse area from Fredericksburg on Route 208 will eventually come face to face with one of the few remaining structures there that witnessed and survived the Civil War. More often than not it is referred to as the old, Sanford’s Tavern, and has many times been mistaken for the Court House itself, due to its imposing form, dominating the T-intersection of Routes 208 and 613. The first components of the structure are said to have been built in 1838. A raging fire gutted the building to a shell in 1905, causing unexploded Civil War artillery …

With the Civil War Sesquicentennial upon us, combined with the growing popularity of the internet and “social networking”, it is no wonder that there are an increasing number of blogs relating to the Civil War. A great many of these blogs have opened hotly contested debates and encouraged barbed attacks from surprisingly partisan and often ill-informed ideologies. Technology is changing our world in an ever quickening pace, making possible a wider dissemination of information and a larger arena from which to exchange differing opinions and ideas. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the …

     The farm of John Henry Myer had been a bucolic delight, occupying a prominent rise above the Ni River valley, and scarcely a mile and a half east of Spotsylvania Courthouse.      The Myer family had purchased the land in late April 1863, and the distance it provided from the horrors of war ravaged downtown Fredericksburg had been a major consideration in the transaction. John Myer, the father, had emigrated from the Kingdom of Hannover in 1846, making Fredericksburg the home for his growing family and the location of his fledgling bakery enterprises on William Street, backing on to …

Roughly six hundred miles north east of Spotsylvania, Virginia is Georgetown, Massachusetts. In the nineteenth century, Georgetown was a prosperous shoe manufacturing town, north of Boston. Eighteen year old Benjamin A. Merrill was a shoe maker as were his siblings and most of his neighbors. As 1861 approached, Merrill certainly watched the news of the impending national crisis with as much anxiety, as did many young men across the United States that winter. When war did break out on April 12, 1861, Merrill did not immediately answer President Lincoln's call for volunteers, however, in …

Spotsylvania County and the entire Commonwealth of Virginia sat on tenterhooks as the end of 1860 loomed near. On Dec. 20 the state of South Carolina had seceded from the Union, causing great anxiety across the south where many still considered themselves to be loyal Union men. In the months leading up to the November election of Republican President Abraham Lincoln, the wealthy and influential men of Spotsylvania had consistently sought moderation in the pending sectional conflict. The exacerbations caused by the Fire-Eaters of King Cotton were however, drawing the nation into an …