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Visit Virginia's historic sites first, then go to a water park

January 18, 2008 12:43 am

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Angels adorn the fire back located in the nursery at Stratford Hall. A 4-year-old Robert E. Lee said goodbye to the angels the day his family moved north from his boyhood home.

It seems as if a new attraction, a water park, is coming to the Fredericksburg area.

More "entertainment" for child and adult alike in a world continually searching for amusement and distraction. All of this at the expense of real gratification, learning, and worthwhile use of time.

In our area, there are so many sites of historic interest, places that reflect our great history and give real meaning to the cold facts in history books--George Washington's birthplace, Stratford Hall, the bloody battlefields of The Wilderness, Sunken Road, and Chatham.

Not far away is Williamsburg, Yorktown, Jamestown, Seven Pines the list goes on and on. How many have traced the path of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth across the Northern Neck to his demise near Port Royal?

How many residents of this area have been to these places? Have many parents have taken their children to these places?

How many even know of the Leedstown Resolves, or have been to that ghost town on the Rappahannock River and marveled at those gentlemen who drafted what was a precursor to our Declaration of Independence?

Schoolchildren should be bused to these places and informed by a knowledgeable teacher of how their present-day lives were molded by those events, those ancestors.

Water parks? They're OK for those who have explored our historic sites first. How many will do that?

Dr. W.R. Gardiner Westmoreland



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