Fredericksburg Battlefield: Coolidge Breaks Ground

The fields surrounding Fredericksburg saw some of the bloodiest fighting of the Civil War. Four major battles were fought in this corridor between eighteen sixty-two and eighteen sixty-four, including the Union disaster at Fredericksburg in December eighteen sixty-two, where more than twelve thousand Federal soldiers fell in a single day attacking Confederate positions on the high ground. It took more than sixty years for the nation to formally commit to preserving the ground.

Congress authorized the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Battlefields Memorial in February nineteen twenty-seven. President Calvin Coolidge traveled here on October nineteenth, nineteen twenty-eight to dedicate the start of that preservation effort. The marker you are passing commemorates that ceremony.

Today the park covers more than eight thousand acres across four battlefields and protects some of the most important terrain in American military history.