For many years after the Civil war, Fredericksburg’s connection with the great tragedy was told in the lines of patient suffering that webbed the faces of the older generation. It was a town of sombre, black figures—the widows and daughters of soldiers—gentle creatures who moved about in quiet dignity, bravely concealing the anguish hidden in their hearts, and smilingly making the best of such disordered conditions and distressing circumstances as before they had never known. It was a town filled with broken, crushed men, ill fitted for the harsher demands of their new lives; men once rich but now suddenly tossed from the foundations that always had sustained them, who found themselves aliens in an unknown and unfriendly world.
Blackened, scarred ruins of what once had been magnificent homes remained mute, grim evidences of the ghastly horror and the quaint old town was stunned and still, a tragic wreck of its one time beauty. But as best it could it gathered up the tangled threads of its existence and for the next decade struggled dumbly and blindly against the terrible disadvantages imposed upon it by the ruthlessness of war.
When the war came with Spain, it showed that the hurt of the Civil strife was gone, when its young men marched proudly through the streets to take their parts in the crisis; sent on their missions of patriotism with the feeble but sincere cheers of aged Confederate veterans ringing in their ears.
With the beginnings of the 20th century, Fredericksburg gave visable evidence of its recovery from the wounds of war. Its business men had accumulated sufficient capital to revive trade, at least partially, on its past scale; additional industries were started, new homes and buildings sprang up and there was the beginning of a general and steady improvement.
A Change in Government
In 1909 a group of progressive citizens, among whom one of the most earnest was the late Henry Warden, a man of immense usefulness, realized their ambition and the consummation of an aim for which they had fought for years, when the old form, of councilmanic government was abolished in favor of the City Manager form, Fredericksburg being one of the first small cities in the country to adopt it. Since its inauguration, the city has prospered and improved. Well laid granolithic sidewalks are placed throughout its business and residential sections, splendid hard gravel streets, topped with smooth asphalt binding, have replaced the old mud roadways, the water system has been enlarged and improved, fire protection increased and other municipal improvements made that have taken the town out of the class of sleepy provincial hamlets and made of it a modern little city. New hotels of the finest type, business enterprises and industrial concerns have come to give it new life and color, but with all this it still retains much that is sweet and old and is filled with the charm and elegance of the past.
Though it has just celebrated its two hundred and fiftieth birthday, the anniversary of a time when America was only beginning to give promise of its brilliant future, a time when the country was young and weak, but when manhood was strong and courage held high the torch of hope, Fredericksburg looks forward to the future with eager longing, confident that in the mirror of its past is the story of the time to come.