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If a hurricane hits, we could lose our history Date published: 10/17/2005
THE ARTICLE in the Oct. 2 View- 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 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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