Trice’s son, Stanley B. Trice, who was nine years old at the time, remembers the City Police stopped by the to make sure there were no accidents.
“At suppertime, we finally got caught up and kept the line out of Route 1,” recalled Trice, who helped his father pump gas after school that Friday afternoon.
Web extras Interstate 95 in the Fredericksburg area opened Dec. 18, 1964. Today begins a three-day series about the highway and the changes it brought to the region. MONDAY: The new highway produced new business growth but doomed many stores along the road. Also, find out about life at the exits.
TUESDAY: I–95 is now clogged much of the time. Are there solutions to this?
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The stream dwindled to a tickle the following day—Dec. 18, 1964—with the opening of the four-lane, 20-mile stretch of I–95 between Massaponax and Triangle. Only five drivers stopped by to gas up, get their oil checked and windshields cleaned.
“That Monday, my father put the gas station up for sale and left that part of his life for a dairy farm in Spotsylvania,” said Trice.
Stanley Trice’s gas station, now the site of a BB&T, was one of dozens of locally owned gas stations, restaurants and motor courts that used to line State Route 1 and the Route 1 Bypass before I-95 opened here. (The 35-mile stretch from Massaponax to Ashland opened in July 16, 1964.)
Those mom-and-pop businesses catered to the hordes of motorists braving the hazardous, undivided lanes and countless crossroads of Route 1, then the primary North/South artery for the East Coast.
But I-95—which was straighter, smoother and safer—changed everything.
Motorists began stopping at the chain hotels, restaurants and gas stations sprouting up at its interchanges. Fredericksburg-area officials started worrying that they’d no longer stop to see the historic sites.
And developers sensed opportunity as people began realizing that they could live in the Fredericksburg area, where housing costs were still relatively low, and commute to high-paying jobs in the Washington area.
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Back in the day
“It [I–95] did open up the world for us. Route 1 was so dangerous, I–95 seemed like a magic carpet. ... The main difference I recall is the speed with which we could go to D.C. Prior to that, we crawled through Woodbridge and Alexandria to get to Washington. Woodbridge always seemed like the grubbiest place, very congested. I recall the first time I sat on the Falmouth Bridge for about five minutes (that would have been about 20 years ago), my thought was, ‘Good grief, we are becoming Woodbridge.’”
—Mary Katherine Greenlaw, Fredericksburg
“I lived in Richmond while they were building the interstate, but my father worked for the Highway Department and he traveled all around the state working to help build it. I have postcards he sent me when he was working in the Fredericksburg area. It was considered too far to drive home to Richmond every evening from Fredericksburg back then, so the state paid to have everyone stay in motels in the area (Today’s commuters will find that funny). He only came home on weekends. Sometimes, if he was staying in a motel with a pool, my mother and sister and I would come and stay in the motel with him for a few days.”
-Rebecca Bezdan, Spotsylvania
“In the early 1940s I would make the trip from Maryland to Louisa County—where my grandparents had a farm—with my Father and Mother or my Uncle Fran, who drove an old Model A Ford (top speed: 40 mph). We would cross the Falmouth Bridge and stop at the Hot Shoppes on the U.S. 1 Bypass. After a cool root beer float, nice on a hot summer day, we would continue on our way.
“Pop liked to take Route 3 west as there were no traffic lights—imagine that. There were farms where the mall is now. The trip took about 4½ hours. Nowadays, if there are no backups, you can make the trip in two hours. It’s just not nearly as interesting!”
—Ralph Mattera, Woodford
“I grew up just off Route 1 at Massaponax. It was, in my mind, as busy as 95 is today, and I remember the trucks were always present. Even as early as the early ’40s it was beginning to be dangerous. My grandfather was killed at the intersection of [Route] 1 and [Route] 607 Dec. 26, 1941. In later years, my father had an accident there and my great uncle in the ’50s.
“I was in Germany when 95 opened, and when I returned, I traveled from Richmond to visit my parents [in Massaponax]. I could have skated in the middle lane [of U.S. 1]. All the traffic was gone, and the businesses were standing silent along the way.”
—Ellen Hayden Johnson, Waynesboro, Va.
“Going north on Route 1, as a child, I would look forward to seeing Storybook Land, which was on the left. Then, near the Pentagon, there was Hot Shoppes, sitting right there where 95 is now. We would stop by for their famous orange slush drink. Heading south from Fredericksburg, there were gas stations that all sold Virginia hams. The hams were wrapped in white cloth and hung down from the overhangs of the gas stations. There were many picnic tables on the side of the road back then.”
—Libby Abilmona, Stafford
“Very shortly following WWII, our family traveled from Norfolk to Washington on a vacation trip. I recall a very circuitous route through downtown Fredericksburg. A trip from Norfolk to D.C. took more than a day. We stayed at some of the old motels, which still stand along the U.S. 1 bypass (they were brand spanking new then). The Twi-Lite Motel hasn’t changed a bit and charged roughly a day’s pay for an overnight stay.
“By the time the ’50s rolled around, everybody complained, ‘Something must be done about the roads around here! It’s nothing but stop-and-go all the way from Richmond to Washington! No place to stay except those flea joints near Fredericksburg.’ Interstate 95 finally arrived.”
—Charter Wells, Spotsylvania
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Businessman Nick Tristano, for example, was initially pleased by the difference he noticed on Route 1. As many as 1,500 cars and trucks an hour had rumbled past the combination store-restaurant he owned on U.S. 1 near Massaponax before the interstate opened, according to one of Goolrick’s articles.
Traffic soon dropped to 400 cars an hour, which made it easier for motorists to notice his business and cross the oncoming lane of traffic to get to it.
“I have served more breakfasts here the past few days than I have on any day the past two years,” he told Goolrick in a story that ran in the paper on July 21, 1964.
And he confided that he’d been sleeping better than he had in a decade because he couldn’t hear the traffic on I-95.
Eventually, however, most of those old businesses faded and died as more and more traffic shifted to the interstate.
Carol C. Nolan, who served five-cent cups of coffee to regulars at the old Chuck Wagon restaurant on Route 1 at Massaponax until she moved to Richmond in 1959, can still recall the shock she felt when she moved back to Fredericksburg 10 years later.
There were practically no cars on Route 1, the stores and restaurants had been boarded up, and most of the people had moved away. Nolan burst into tears.
“It had definitely gone from the good to the bad to the ugly,” she recalled recently, “but of course you can’t stop progress.”
And progress was occurring.
“[The opening of I-95] was looked on in a very positive manner in Fredericksburg,” said Freeman Funk, who was city manager at the time.
He said city officials had learned that a major new road in the area could be a beneficial when the Bypass was built in 1946. That road helped divert the traffic that used to clog downtown streets, and made it easier for locals to shop there.
“I think we were really grateful that 95 did come as close to the city as it did.” Funk said. “Its hard to imagine what development would have been without it. I don’t think that Central Park would be thriving like it is or would have been there at all if 95 hadn’t come through.”
The late Sidney Shannon, who raised Black Angus cattle on a farm facing State Route 3 before I-95 split his property, was one of the first in the area to take advantage of the changes the interstate was bringing.
He built the Sheraton-Fredericksburg Motor Inn, now the Holiday Inn Select at Central Park, on part of his farm. The new motel, which included two silos from Shannon’s barn, opened with great fanfare—and one of his Black Angus cows on display in the lobby, Funk said.
“The opening kind of perked up people’s ears about what could happen and maybe what should happen [in what was then a fairly rural area],” said Funk. “They saw the success there and started building.
Development had also starting to occur near the Four Mile Fork area, where a Holiday Inn, now Ramada Inn South, had been built in 1961. Holiday Inn was founded in Memphis, Tenn., in 1952, and followed the U.S. interstate highway system as it spread across the country. (Another Holiday Inn would be built on State Route 17 near I-95 in 1973.)
Funk said that Spotsylvania’s Board of Supervisors knew the Four Mile Fork area was a prime location for hotel and motel development, but it didn’t have access to water and sewer systems. The City Council realized the hotel would be good for Fredericksburg, and agreed to finance and install a water line to the Holiday Inn until the county could take it over.
“It lead to all the business development at Four Mile Fork,” Funk said.
By 1965, the Fredericksburg Regional Chamber of Commerce was pushing the state to include information about area tourism sites at a proposed rest stop on the southbound lane of I-95 just north of State Route 3.
The late Susie Hallberg, then director of the Fredericksburg Information Center, had warned chamber members the previous year that while visitation was up, people might not stop here after I-95 opened. Tourism , she feared, could dip as much as 80 percent.
“I’m afraid we’re going to see a terrific difference,” she was reported as saying in the Aug. 7, 1964, edition of The Free Lance-Star.
But others, including Kenmore Director Col. Robert D. Burhans, said they were convinced that the area’s $10 million-a-year tourism industry would benefit because visitors wouldn’t have to spend as much time on the road getting to their destinations.
In July of 1964, 7,615 people had stopped at the Fredericksburg Information Center, according to Hallberg. That was an nearly 56 percent increase over the 4,884 who had visited the year before.
Today the Fredericksburg area still lags behind such places as Williamsburg and Ocean City, Md., as top tourist destinations, but more than 200,000 people stopped at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania visitors centers last year, according to a recent study.
Perhaps one of the most far-reaching impacts of I-95, however, is that it put the area within convenient commuting distance to Washington.
Real estate agents were soon fielding calls from people who wanted to live in the country and developers who wanted to invest in large tracts of rural land.
“Most of my Saturday mornings are taken up talking to people from Washington who want to move here or in Stafford and Spotsylvania,” an unnamed bank official in an April 3, 1965 article in The Free Lance-Star. “They say Interstate 95 is the reason.”
The Fredericksburg area’s population rate had been relatively stable until that point, said John Taylor, a former Spotsylvania County long-range planner.
The county had 10,850 residents in 1850, and only 11,920 a century later. But the population skyrocketed to 57,403 by 1990, a 415 percent increase, he said.
Today, the Fredericksburg area is among the fastest growing in the country. Stafford had 111,021 residents in 2003, while Spotsylvania had 107,838 and Fredericksburg had 20,189, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Some of them even live and work in the buildings that used to house those old mom-and-pop businesses along Route 1.
The former Brown’s Courts 2 miles north of Fredericksburg, for example, is now Fox Chase Apartments. And the old Hotel Virginia, a large, two-story square brick building near the Stafford County Courthouse, is an office building.
“The economic impacts of new roads such as I-95 are always great because things of that magnitude change transportation patterns, which changes everything,” said said Erik Nelson, Fredericksburg’s senior planner. “We’ve seen enormous growth in the last 20, 30 years, and its just going to get more rapid. I think it’s just beginning.”
To reach CATHY JETT: 540/374-5407 cjett@freelancestar.com