Fredericksburg, VA

In the morning we visited Chatham, a manor house built in 1771, on the east side of Fredericksburg.  Its owners fled with the arrival of the Union Army, which made this house its headquarters and set up camp here two days before the battle.

The garden

View from the driveway looking down on Fredericksburg and the Rappahannock River.  Union soldiers set up and crossed this river on pontoon bridges before dawn on the day of the battle.

After the battle, Chatham and many other homes in Fredericksburg became hospitals.  Clara Barton came here before the battle in order to help the wounded who would be brought to Chatham.  The night before the battle she wrote a letter to her cousin, saying:

The moon is shining through the...haze with a brightness almost prophetic.  I have stood alone in the awful stillness of its glimmering light, gazing upon the strange, sad scene around me striving to say 'Thy Will, O God, be done.' 

The campfires blaze with...brightness, the sentry's head is still but quick, the acres of little shelter tents are dark and still as death.

This room in Chatham was at one time the room where George Washington stayed when he visited his friend, William Fitzhugh, who built Chatham.  After the Battle of Fredericksburg it became a surgery where amputations were performed   Surgeons threw the severed limbs out this and an adjacent window. 

Walt Whitman, who cared for the wounded at Chatham after the battle, wrote in his book, The Wound Dresser:

Outdoors, at the foot of a tree, within ten feet of the front of the house, I noticed a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc--about a load for a one-horse cart.  Several dead bodies lie near, each covered with its brown woolen blanket.

We left Chatham and drove into town where we visited the Fredericksburg Area Museum.  Native Americans inhabited this area for 15,000 years prior to the Europeans.  In 1590, the Belgian engraver Theodor de Bry published several engravings of Native American life based on the drawings of John White who had accompanied earlier expeditions to present-day Virginia.

We stopped for a sandwich and a cherry coke at Goolrick's Pharmacy, in business since the mid-1800s, which still has a soda fountain.

Historic Fredericksburg

As we headed east to New Jersey, we passed the Bowie Public Library in Bowie, MD...

crossed some bridges...

and watched the sun set behind us.

TONSORIAL TIP:

The word "sideburns," hair on the sides of a man's face, was originally "burnsides"--in honor of General Ambrose Burnside, commander of the Union forces at the Battle of Fredericksburg, who wore them.