Qualla: Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park

Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hlj, Public domain. Within a thirty-mile circle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, four major Civil War battles were fought in eighteen months. Combined casualties exceeded 100,000. The National Park Service combines the battlefields into a single unit with the longest official name in the system - Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County Battlefields Memorial National Military Park, seventy-five letters - and protects 8,374 acres across the rolling country between the Rappahannock and the Po. Roughly 15,000 Union soldiers are buried on Marye's Heights above the city, on ground the Confederates held during the worst slaughter of the war's first half. Two-thirds of those headstones bear no name.

Image: Hlj | Public domain

Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park: Fredericksburg, December 1862

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Something Original (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. General Ambrose Burnside marched the Army of the Potomac to the north bank of the Rappahannock in November 1862, planning to cross on pontoon bridges before Robert E. Lee could get there. The pontoons arrived late. By the time Burnside's engineers had laid them and bombarded the ...

Image: Something Original (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park: Chancellorsville, May 1863

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NPS staff, Public domain. Five months later, Joseph Hooker came south with a larger Union army intending to do what Burnside had failed to do. Lee split his outnumbered force in two on May 2 and sent Stonewall Jackson on a long, looping march around Hooker's right flank. Jackson struck at dusk and rolled ...

Image: NPS staff | Public domain

Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park: The Wilderness and Spotsylvania, May 1864

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Something Original (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. A year later Ulysses S. Grant crossed the Rapidan with a still larger Union army and fought Lee for the first time in the dense second-growth scrub forest west of Chancellorsville. The Battle of the Wilderness on May 5-7, 1864, blunted both armies' tactical capabilities; the wood...

Image: Something Original (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park: Marye's Heights

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Something Original (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Congress created Fredericksburg National Cemetery in July 1865, just three months after Appomattox, on the same ridge from which Confederates had cut down the Union assaults of December 1862. There are 15,243 Civil War burials. Only 2,473 are identified by name. The rest lie in m...

Image: Something Original (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park: What the Park Protects

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Something Original (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The park took shape in 1927 as a War Department property and was transferred to the National Park Service in 1933. It now protects 8,374 acres, of which 7,369 are federally owned. More than 500,000 people visit each year. The interpretive footprint covers four battlefields, four ...

Image: Something Original (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0