A Single Moment in Time
The Welford House. December 11, 1862:

"We then entered the back door and passed upstairs to the front. Gilman Nichols of Company A was in advance. He found the door locked and burst it open with the butt of his musket. The moment it opened he fell dead, shot from a house on the other side of the street. Several others were wounded, but we held the house until dark, firing at a head whenever we saw one on the other side."

Lt. Jack Adams 19th Mass. Vol. Infantry

A Cry for Computer Enhancement
The colors of the house, the flag, and the flowers all cried out for me to push the enhancement button.

The Next Best Thing to Old Buildings
There is something about a wrought iron gate in an old brick wall. Oops! My finger slipped again.

The Rappahannock on a Beautiful Summer Day

Another Reminder to Slowdown and Look Up
An interesting weather vane on Lewis Street.

For A Simpler(?) Time
A horse/carriage hitch in front of the Doggett House (circa 1817). It is said that Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States, stood on the porch of this house at the beginning of the Civil War and told the residents of Fredericksburg that the war would not come here. The city would soon after become a focal point of the struggle and the site of two battles.

They May Pass from Sight But Never From Memory
The National Cemetery on Marye Heights Marker #619--The roots of a cedar tree are slowly covering this grave marker. Without the flag it would be easy to miss. The "3" on the marker denotes the number of unidentified remains buried here. To see 4, 5, and 6s on these markers are not uncommon. Of the 15,000 plus buried here, mostly from the Civil War, only roughly 2500 are identified. When the cemetery was established in July 1865 Union dead were brought in from battlefields throughout the area. A bounty was paid by the government for remains. Some unscrupulous individuals would break-up remains and claim them as more than one individual. Later the rules were changed that the bounty was paid per skull.

Director of Photography Dave Ellis and I climbed up the scaffolding around St. George’s Episcopal church in Fredericksburg the other night to photograph the fireworks with the city in the foreground. The plan was to take several cameras up, each with a different lens, and trigger the cameras at intervals and then put all the pictures together into a time-lapse video. We got up there insanely early and began setting up the cameras. In the end, we had two mounted and firing intervals and each of us had a camera that we would trigger on our own. As it happened, Dave’s camera was in a less than ideal position as we miscalculated the position of the show in relation to the foreground. My frames were OK but with only one perspective, it is kind of a boring video. I wouldn’t say the thing is a total failure but it didn ‘t rise to the levels I had hoped.  On the upside, from our vantage point we spotted a few locations around downtown that might serve as better positions to photograph from next year. Click on the image above to see the show.