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Volume 12, Issue 7

July 2021

Central Rappahannock Heritage Center

Newsletter

A place that loses its history loses its soul

Message From The Chairman

"Light at the End of the Tunnel"

There really was light at the end of the tunnel after all. The Governor of Virginia has lifted Covid restrictions effective 30 June 2021.

The Heritage Center Board will meet in person at the Center on 20 July. New Board members, elected at the 2020 Annual meeting, will meet the other Board members in person for the first time. This will be the first in person Board meeting since March 2020. Zoom allowed us to function but could never replace the interaction that takes place when looking into the eyes of a person across the table, or observing their body language.

In my message last month, I commented on the reopening of the CRHC. I am pleased to report that we are on schedule for a soft reopening around mid-July. The training of new volunteers and retraining of returning volunteers is moving forward. An Open House is planned for late Summer or early Fall. A Silent Auction will be held in conjunction with the Open House.

Our September Annual Meeting is right around the corner. The Nominating Committee will recommend the election of four replacement board members for three-year terms. They will replace board members whose terms will expire at the end of November. In addition, with the approval of the Board, we will make an appointment to fill an unexpired vacancy at the July meeting to bring us to our full complement of 17 board members.

And finally, the Board enjoyed a marvelous FredNats ballgame on Father’s Day thanks to the kind invitation of Councilman William (Billy) Withers. It was great to be with him and Alma. And we brought the team good luck! They won in extra innings.

Jack A. Apperson, Chairman

The Heritage Center

Welcome New Members!

William Cooper

Norman Voss

Heritage Center memberships support the important work done by The Center.

The Central Rappahannock Heritage Center is a non-profit, all-volunteer archive whose mission is to preserve historically valuable material of the region and make it available to the public for research.

Please join us as part of the Heritage Center's preservation team. As a member, you will be helping to preserve our priceless local history.

Click here to become a member today!

Membership

Thank you for your support,

The Heritage Center

MANY THANKS TO OUR GENEROUS

2021 HERITAGE CENTER SPONSORS

Barbara Barrett

Barbara H. Cecil

Dovetail Cultural Resource Group

Kitty Farley and Vic Ramoneda

Jim and Betsy Greene

Mary Katherine Greenlaw

Lucy and Wayne Harman

Mary Jane O'Neill

Hon. and Mrs. J.M.H. Willis

To become a Heritage Center Sponsor, please visit our website. If you have any questions, please contact The Heritage Center at (540) 373-3704.

Admonishments

Do you remember hearing your parents or adults warning you about specific dangers? One local resident does. She said that her aunts told her about the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s child in 1932. This high profile crime, which resulted in the death of the legendary aviator’s son, shook the nation. Kidnappings were unfortunately neither new nor rare, but this one seemed to strike at the heart of every American parent.

In Fredericksburg, hundreds of miles from the New Jersey site of the Lindbergh crime, parents or trusted neighbors walked children to and from school. Lafayette Elementary School, now the Fredericksburg Branch of the Central Rappahannock Library, was just a four blocks north of one family’s home on Lewis Street. Even so, an adult walked the children to and from school. Years later, in 1996, several children were abducted shortly after getting off their school buses. Immediately adults started standing at bus stops waiting in the morning until the students were picked up and returned to greet the children as they stepped off the buses in the afternoon. Twenty five years later, they still do.

Did something momentous, good or bad, occur during your childhood? Would you like to know more about it or how it impacted our area, even if it happened elsewhere? The vast Heritage Center’s resources can help you learn more. The Center has diaries and personal calendars and journals, correspondence and bound copies of newspapers. Check out the Stearns Collection. One of the family will have a comment on practically anything, anywhere in their letters written between the 1880s and 1950s.

Soon, we hope, the Center will reopen for research. Until then, search the archives online and see what’s available. When the Center reopens come in person.

Beth Daly

Volunteer

Collections Update

Collections continue to be donated and processed by a core group of volunteers. Since our June newsletter we have received the following collections:

Book: A Civil War tome titled; Common Men in the War for the Common Man, Book II.

Three undated, unidentified portraits: One each of a woman and one of a family.

Book: Where Valor Proudly Sleeps, A History of Fredericksburg National Cemetery, 1866-1933.

An 1873 pamphlet for "Manufactured Fertilizer", titled Piedmont Guano. It lists agents in Spotsylvania and Caroline Counties, and 13 named references.

Books: Simply Murder, The Battle of Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862; and No Turning Back, A Guide to the 1864 Overland Campaign.

As we are “opening up” a little more compared to the last months and interest has been renewed in more diverse activities, perhaps it is time to reassess the needs of the old photographs, letters, scrapbooks, business records, or ledgers found during the “Clean-up” phase of home isolation!

Please contact The Heritage Center for information concerning the donation of historical pieces. And remember, value is in the eyes of the historian. Nothing is unimportant.

Thank you for your interest in the Center's collections.

John Reifenberg

Collections Manager