For those of you who enjoy researching - or reliving - the Civil War, you will be envious when I tell you I am at ground zero tonight - Fredericksburg, Virginia. In fact I drove through (or near) most of the famous sites of the 1861 to 1864 conflict - names the rest of you should know if you were paying attention in US history class. Appomattox, Petersburg, Spotsylvania. And Richmond. And I went past several battlefield sites the names of which only the aficionado will recognize - High Bridge, Saylor's Creek, Five Forks, Drewry's Bluff.
Unfortunately if you exalt the past, you'll hate the present. I rolled into Fredericksburg at about 6:30 and was rather surprised to find traffic on southbound I-95 crawling along. Believe it or not, it is from the evening rush of commuters trying to get home - from Washington D.C. This is how far they drive these days in order to escape the big city. I'm not sure but D.C. must be 50 miles up the highway.
What that means for this area is that there is tremendous growth. Which puts considerable pressure on battlefield preservationists to save what they can of a vanishing topography. There is, I'm told, a large tract of land just west of my hotel that was a key part of the landscape in Stonewall Jackson's legendary march around the Union army in May, 1862 that resulted in the destruction of one wing of that army and provided Robert E Lee with what proved to be his most spectacular victory of the war. Today it is a large residential development. With high-end homes.
I guess the moral of this story is this: If you intend to travel to Fredericksburg, Virginia in order to take in those legendary sites like the "muleshoe" at Spotsylvania, or the stone wall or Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg, or Todd's Tavern at the Wilderness, or the Chancellor House at Chancellorsville, you'd better hurry. Either that or anticipate seeing a Denny's where the Irish Brigade met its fate.
