What do we have to lose in a Katrina-like flood? Just our history
When Hurricane Isabel visited Fredericksburg in September 2003, materials in the library's Virginiana Room had to be hurriedly removed. SUZANNE CARR ROSSI/THE FREE LANCE-STAR
If a hurricane hits, we could lose our history
Date published: 10/17/2005
THE ARTICLE in the Oct. 2 View- points by John Hennessy, the chief historian of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park ["Disaster's timeless rhythm: Fredericksburg's 1862 ordeal has echoes now, in 2005"], aptly compared the devastation caused by the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862 and Hurricane Katrina's destruction. It contains a significant lesson we would be wise to heed. Both were acts of circumstance--nature (Katrina) for New Orleans, its fateful location on the road to Richmond for Fredericksburg.
We owe a debt of gratitude to the National Park Service for documenting our catastrophic moment in the sun. It is a drawing card for Civil War buffs and our tourism industry. But like New Orleans, Fredericksburg has much more history that should be remembered and commemorated.
The Wallace Library, now the home of the city School Board offices, was the forerunner of our Central Rappahannock Regional Library and was the vision of C. Wistar Wallace. When it opened its doors in 1910, its holdings contained the nucleus of our local history collection. This was passed on to CRRL when the regional system was inaugurated in 1969. Through the years, the Virginiana collection has since grown enormously by acquisitions and by the new technologies for data collection, including microfilmed records, genealogy resources, and, very definitely, the Internet. We have, on microfilm, our local newspapers dating back to 1786; also the minutes of the Spotsylvania Court (1722), St. George's Parish Vestry (1726), and our City Council dating from the first meeting after its incorporation in 1782.
Today, we have a collection of area records and documents very likely unmatched anywhere else in America. Further, we have added remarkable indexes and the 20th-century contributions of A.W. Embrey and Robert Hodge and the archivist Barry McGhee.
When I moved to Fredericksburg in 1976, as a curious reader without academic credentials, I soon realized that wherever I turned, some interesting glimpse of early history was at my fingertips. Reading the Colonial court records, the minutes of the vestry (the Crown's other administrative arm), and tracing the earliest land transactions on a modern map, I was able to present the highlights of our half-century of Colonial life ("Forgotten Companions"). This was not a profound work of scholarship, merely an ambitious summary for which my miscellaneous work career had fortuitously prepared me.
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