Fredericksburg is one of those towns that's been lucky enough to preserve plenty of colonial buildings all these years. Some blocks probably look similar to how they looked in the 1700s, minus the power lines and parked cars. I think most Virginians visit Fredericksburg on elementary school field trips, as I did, but I was well overdue for another visit.
So on the day after Christmas, Dan and I made the 45-minute drive and went to some historical sites, thanks to the free tickets kindly bestowed on me by Preservation Virginia.
The Mary Washington House is a lovely but very modest cottage that GW built for his mother in her older years. The tour guide and I geeked out about the warm, muted shade of green used on the parlor walls and how it contrasts with the bright, rather garish green used at Mount Vernon. My favorite part of this property is the garden, though. Plenty of gnarled old boxwoods and a lush lawn would have made this the perfect little escape for Mary in the middle of the city. I need to go back sometime when it's warmer though, and see the garden in its full glory.
The Rising Sun Tavern is the site I remember most vividly from childhood, and indeed I think it's still the most kid-friendly attraction of the three we visited. Though the building was like 20 different things over the years, they've got it set up as it would have been when it was a tavern in the 1790s. The "tavern wenches" that guide your tour focus on the chronology of a typical tavern stay during that time period, highlighting lots of familiar turns-of-phrase which have their origins in revolutionary-era customs (like "mind your Ps and Qs"). It's interesting to see the difference between how a layman's stay at the tavern would have gone, as opposed to a gentleman's stay (like the Marquis de Lafayette on his big tour of the US).
Hugh Mercer Apothecary Shop is the place to hear about all the weird / gross 18th-century methods of doctoring that you would expect. A sign on the door proclaims that they've recently gotten a new shipment of the "finest Swedish leeches." The elderly guides love to get a reaction out of people when they talk about amputations and bloodletting, but we've been to so many Civil War museums with related content that we remain nonplussed. The thing that got me was seeing the instrument used for pulling teeth. YIKES. My favorite part of this tour is standing at the big pharmacy counter and smelling all the vials and jars of different 18th century medicines, and hearing about what each one was used to cure. It's fun to notice how many of those ingredients are still used somehow or other in our modern treatments today.
After the museums we headed down to Caroline Street for plenty of antiquing and food.
Anyway, we had a lovely time and as Fredericksburg is just a short jaunt from Richmond and these museums are incredibly cheap, I highly recommend making a day of it.
More pictures are here.
