New Exhibit Focuses On Fredericksburg Area Residents
By Scott C. Boyd
(February/March 2009 Civil War News)
FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — Try to imagine the sights and sounds of 100 artillery rounds per minute crashing into a small town where some 5,000 people lived before the war. Almost every building is hit and nearly 100 are destroyed.
After the enemy army muscles its way into the town and drives the friendly forces out, discipline breaks down and the occupiers become looters, forcibly removing anything they please.
A subsequent battle inflicts horrendous casualties on the invaders who then retreat.
This is what happened to the residents of Fredericksburg from Dec. 11-15, 1862. They had the singular bad luck to live in a town 50 miles from each of the opposing capitals of Richmond and Washington.
Ultimately, four major battles were fought within 20 miles of the city: Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House. More than 100,000 men were killed or wounded in these battles, making this small area the most blood-soaked ground in all of North America, according to the National Park Service.
“Fredericksburg at War,” a new permanent exhibit at the Fredericksburg Area Museum and Cultural Center (FAMCC), focuses on what happened to the city and its residents during the Civil War. In addition, it describes the far less traumatic involvement in the American Revolution and World Wars I and II.
The new exhibit is housed in the Catherine W. Jones McKann Center, which opened on Dec. 6, the 20th anniversary of FAMCC’s opening. The new facility is in the renovated former Planters’ National Bank, built in 1927 and acquired by the museum in 2004, and is across the corner from the circa 1817 former Fredericksburg town hall/market house, which FAMCC uses.
The McKann Center is named for the late donor and former vice chairman of the board of directors in honor of her support of the locally-run non-profit museum.
It has about 10,000 objects in its collection, according to president and CEO Edwin W. Watson, who remains the museum’s first and only director. The museum’s emphasis is on the lives of people in the Greater Fredericksburg area, including Stafford, Spotsylvania, King George and Caroline counties.
Area residents donated many of the objects. “A lot of things keeping coming out of the woodwork,” Watson said.
A prime example of donations is the Johnson Gun Collection. Ralph W. Johnson, an area doctor in the 1920s-1940s, was an avid gun collector who specialized in guns that were “used here in Fredericksburg,” according to Watson. “People would pay him with guns when they didn’t have enough money during the Depression to pay him any other way.”
Dr. Johnson sold his entire collection of 400 Civil War-era guns to the city in the 1940s for $900. The City of Fredericksburg didn’t own a museum or have a historical resources department but bought the collection “to keep it here,” Watson said.
Local businessman Charles G. McDaniel, who owns Hilldrup Moving and Storage, stored the collection for many years. When the Fredericksburg Area Museum and Cultural Center opened “We were told we could go and take whatever we wanted to out of the collection. We did. We took about a hundred pieces,” Watson said.
The rest were sold and the proceeds ended up in a fund to maintain the collection. McDaniel paid for the large storage cases that display a part of the collection, which hasn’t been shown in over a decade.
Considering the presence of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Battlefield Park with its visitor center on the historic Sunken Road at the foot of Marye’s Heights, Watson needed to determine FAMCC’s role in telling the story of the battle.
“We looked long and hard at how we’d do the Civil War. No point in doing battles – the Park Service does that well,” he said.
“As time went on, we kept getting objects that told stories of people who lived here during the war.” This eventually evolved into the Fredericksburg at War exhibit.
Museum curator Mary Dellinger’s favorite large artifact in the exhibit is the walnut drop-leaf table (dating to about 1820), which was in the Charles Layton house on lower Caroline Street. During the fighting in December 1862, a solid shot artillery round came into the house and struck the table, leaving damage visitors can still see. “This shows what people went through,” she said.
A Book of Common Prayer (Episcopal Church, 1853) in the collection has the inscription, “Given to my Confederate mother who’s nursed me back from certain death.” The interesting thing is, it was from a Union soldier, who simply signed it as “H.” The local resident was Virginia Knox. The soldier was badly wounded in the mouth and “crawled up on the porch of a lady downtown,” Watson explained.
“She took enormous pity on him and took him in the house – she was not supposed to do that, as you well know. She nursed him back and sewed him up, too. He helped her financially well after the war. But if she had sent him off to the Confederate lines he probably would have died because of lack of care.” The prayer book had been on display for 15 years and is currently in storage, according to Dellinger.
“Those stories are always very interesting and get people involved. We try to come across with the idea that those people were not very different from what you and I today are,” said Watson.
Visitors to Fredericksburg have numerous Civil War sites and museums to visit and Watson summed up why one of their stops should be the FAMCC:
“If they want to get a good understanding of the impact it had on the city — the war on the people of the city – they can get that better here than anywhere else.”
Through February the museum is open Monday-Saturday 10-4 and Sunday 1-4 p.m. March through November hours are Monday-Saturday 10-5 and Sunday 1-5. The museum is closed Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Day, New Year’s Eve and Day.
Adult admission is $7, student $2 and ages 6 and under free. For information call (540) 371-3037, e-mail msaffos@famcc.org or visit www.famcc.org
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