Historic Fredericksburg: The Story of an Old Town. Goolrick John Tackett

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ house, clerks office, the Episcopal Orphan Asylum, the Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and Reform Baptist Church. It had two banks, one female and one male academy of the higher class; a water system supplied through pipes from Poplar Spring. And the upper river canal was being built, a public enterprise from which great results were expected and which was to extend about forty miles up the Rappahannock. Gold was being mined in considerable quantities in upper Spotsylvania and lower Culpeper counties and brought to Fredericksburg in exchange for goods, and a generally thriving trade was being done, chiefly in grain, bacon, tobacco and other farm products for export. One writer has computed the city’s annual exports at that time as averaging four million dollars, and Government statistics show that there were in the town in 1840, seventy-three stores, two tanneries, one grist mill, two printing plants, four semi-weekly newspapers, five academies with 256 students, and seven schools with 165 scholars. The population in that year was 3,974. Ten years previous it had been 3,308, divided as follows: whites, 1,797; slaves, 1,124; free blacks, 387.

The City Limits Are Set

      From 1840 until the middle fifties, prosperity was continued. The canal was completed and had brought about an increased business at a lower cost. A railroad was in operation from Richmond through Fredericksburg to Aquia Creek, and steamboats had to some extent taken the place of sailing vessels as a means of water transportation, meaning quicker trips with greater burdens. In 1851 the legislature passed an act empowering the town to extend its limits, which was done according to a survey made by William Slaughter, and though that was more than seventy years ago, and though the population has since more than doubled, overflowing the limits and encroaching on the adjoining county, the limits have not again been enlarged.

      In 1855 Fredericksburg’s trade had ceased to grow at a rate equal to its average yearly increase for the previous twenty years, a condition for which the business men of that day were not altogether responsible, but which rather was brought about by the new commercial era the country and world was just entering – the era of railroad transportation, which quickly and cheaply, in comparison to past charges, carried the staples of the farm to the ports of the sea where waiting vessels stood ready to spread their sable sails on voyages to foreign markets. This era created the importance of the seaport and spelled the doom, as important shipping points, of the tidewater cities – those which had been located at the point where mountain torrent and still water meet in order to get both the advantage of power production and trade routes.

      It is true that the business men of the city made the serious mistake about this period of building a plank road into one portion of the upper country from which they derived much trade, instead of building a railroad, for just a little later transportation by wagon train for export purposes had nearly entirely given away to transportation by rail, and Fredericksburg was utterly without such connection with its greatest field of trade, which soon was largely converted into other channels by the railroads now beginning to practically surround the town at a distance of approximately forty miles to the west. The single railroad passing through Fredericksburg had no coast terminal. Throughout its short length it paralleled the coast, offering no means of shipping for export, which comprised most of the business of the day. The plantation owners of the upper country who had dealt nearly entirely in Fredericksburg, now found it cheaper to haul to the railroad passing through their country and soon Fredericksburg was belted by little towns to the west. When later the P. F. & P. R. R. was built to Orange, it did not save the situation and except for lumber and ties, a trade it still largely enjoys, it has never hauled much to Fredericksburg for export, though it did help the city considerably in the matter of retail business.

      Trade, however, had not ceased entirely to grow, nor the town to increase. In 1860 its population was nearly 5,000 persons, its business men still were active and prosperous and, but for the Civil war which was to come, they doubtless would have found a way out of the commercial difficulty confronting them and a different history of the town from that time forward might have been written.

The War Ends Prosperity

      But over the course of a few years preceding this date, the community was troubled and torn by political strife and moral dissention. Black and ominous on the horizon of men’s thoughts loomed the slave question, perplexing the country’s leaders and giving threats of the red carnage that was to follow. A carnage that cost millions in men and money, caused unreckoned anguish and suffering, and retarded the growth of the South to such an extent that at the end of the following fifty years it had only just begun to emerge from the black shadow cast over it by the war.

      By the end of the fifty’s, trade had almost ceased, a spirit of patriotism for the Southland superseded that of commercial enterprise, the quietness of the soft old Colonial town was broken by wild public meetings; soon the call of a bugle floated softly across the still air and the heavy monotonous tread of feet sounded against the ground in unison to the beating of drums, and though the citizens had been loyal to the Union, sending by nearly a two-thirds majority a Union man to the State convention, they made ready for the inevitable conflict, and when the flame of war burst on the country like a flaring torch, they threw in their lots with the land of their nativity and bravely shouldering their arms, marched away from their homes to a fate that would bring them death or sorrow, and reduce their land to a shambles. The story of the Civil war as it effected this town is told in other chapters which follow this.

A Town in “No Man’s Land”

      For many years after the Civil war, Fredericksburg’s connection with the great tragedy was told in the lines of patient suffering that webbed the faces of the older generation. It was a town of sombre, black figures – the widows and daughters of soldiers – gentle creatures who moved about in quiet dignity, bravely concealing the anguish hidden in their hearts, and smilingly making the best of such disordered conditions and distressing circumstances as before they had never known. It was a town filled with broken, crushed men, ill fitted for the harsher demands of their new lives; men once rich but now suddenly tossed from the foundations that always had sustained them, who found themselves aliens in an unknown and unfriendly world.

      Blackened, scarred ruins of what once had been magnificent homes remained mute, grim evidences of the ghastly horror and the quaint old town was stunned and still, a tragic wreck of its one time beauty. But as best it could it gathered up the tangled threads of its existence and for the next decade struggled dumbly and blindly against the terrible disadvantages imposed upon it by the ruthlessness of war.

      When the war came with Spain, it showed that the hurt of the Civil strife was gone, when its young men marched proudly through the streets to take their parts in the crisis; sent on their missions of patriotism with the feeble but sincere cheers of aged Confederate veterans ringing in their ears.

      With the beginnings of the 20th century, Fredericksburg gave visable evidence of its recovery from the wounds of war. Its business men had accumulated sufficient capital to revive trade, at least partially, on its past scale; additional industries were started, new homes and buildings sprang up and there was the beginning of a general and steady improvement.

A Change in Government

      In 1909 a group of progressive citizens, among whom one of the most earnest was the late Henry Warden, a man of immense usefulness, realized their ambition and the consummation of an aim for which they had fought for years, when the old form, of councilmanic government was abolished in favor of the City Manager form, Fredericksburg being one of the first small cities in the country to adopt it. Since its inauguration, the city has prospered and improved. Well laid granolithic sidewalks are placed throughout its business and residential sections, splendid hard gravel streets, topped with smooth asphalt binding, have replaced the old mud roadways, the water system has been enlarged and improved, fire protection increased and other municipal improvements made that have taken the town out of the class of sleepy provincial hamlets and made of it a modern little city. New hotels of the finest type, business enterprises and industrial concerns have come to give it new life and color, but with all this it still retains much that is sweet and old and is filled with the charm and elegance of the past.

      Though it has just celebrated its two hundred and fiftieth birthday, the СКАЧАТЬ