Entries by HFFI Staff

HFFI’s 2024 Preservation Award Recipients

The Historic Fredericksburg Foundation, Inc., held its 69th Annual Membership Meeting on Saturday, March 9, recognizing people, businesses, and institutions that have made outstanding contributions to preserving the unique cultural heritage and historic built environment of the Fredericksburg area. Five recipients of HFFI’s 2024 Preservation Awards were individuals. The first, retired Spotsylvania middle school teacher […]

HFFI supports expert’s Preservation Recommendations and the creation of Preservation Advisory Group

Throughout 2023, Fredericksburg city staff and Historic Resources Planner, Kate Schwartz, worked with Heritage Arts of North Carolina LLC to enhance incentives and non-regulatory tools for preservation and to update the city’s spot blight/demolition-by-neglect provisions (see Chapter 8, Goal 2). Heritage Arts is a North Carolina-based historic preservation consulting services firm owned and operated by […]

Upper Caroline Neighborhood History

Researched by Jan Waltonen & Roger Engels, HFFI Marker Committee Written by Jan Waltonen Article compiled for the 2019 Candlelight Tour. Properties on the tour included the Rising Sun Tavern, 1308, 1309, 1310, 1513, and 1517 Caroline Street. This year’s Candlelight Tour (CLT) explores a neighborhood whose history began more than a hundred years before […]

Good-bye Summer (thanks for 200 years of hard work!)

By Danae Peckler, Architectural Historian / HFFI Board Member If you have visited the Lewis Store at any point in the past couple of years, you might have caught a glimpse of it. Exposed, sagging, and broken. The building’s old summer beam, that is. Defined by preservation professionals in An Illustrated Glossary of Early Southern […]

Historic Bricks and Mortar 

by Natalie Chavez and Danae Peckler; edited by Linda Billard The Lewis Store, HFFI’s headquarters, is the embodiment of honest brick construction in a classic Georgian architectural style from the mid-eighteenth century. This mass masonry brick building has multiple wythes, or vertical sections of brick wall, laid in two different bonds. The Lewis Store’s elevation […]

Library marks Golden Anniversary

Written by Nancy Moore Fifty years ago this month, the Central Rappahannock Regional Library was launched as a demonstration library serving Fredericksburg and surrounding counties. Trustees of Fredericksburg’s Wallace Library, established in 1908, realized that the small city library could not adequately serve the area’s growing population. The Wallace trustees considered building a new library on Washington Avenue […]

“Battle of the Silversmith House” fought in 1962

Written by Wendy Migdal, Edits by Linda Billard, HFFI Volunteers Soon after the Revolutionary War, a small one-and-a-half story wooden house was built on Sophia Street. Its address would not become 813 until years later. It rested on a shelf of shale by the river and had two levels of basements. Other than that, it […]