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Nov 5, 2024 | 
fredericksburg.com | Wendy Migdal
By now, most locals are likely aware of the events that will take place later in November to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit to Fredericksburg. It seems fitting to take a look back through the archives and re-experience the event in 1824, and also to see how it was remembered in 1924.
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Aug 6, 2024 | 
fredericksburg.com | Wendy Migdal
We’ve made it through another July, typically the hottest month in Virginia, though August has sometimes given it a run for its money. How did people survive this heat without air conditioning, we wonder. Let’s take a look through the archives to see how people coped with midsummer, aka “hell’s front porch.”There were a few quite hot summers around the turn of the last century.
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Jun 25, 2024 | 
fredericksburg.com | Wendy Migdal
If there’s any decade that serves up interesting items from the archives to write about, it would have to be the 1920s. It was a time of great change, and in many ways, the birth of the modern era. The population was overwhelmingly young. It may have been the relief at having made through a world war and a global pandemic, but people seemed interested in having fun, and in pushing limits in order to do so. The Daily Star in June of 1922 related two strikingly similar stories.
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May 14, 2024 | 
fredericksburg.com | Wendy Migdal
On April 24, 1922, two trains arrived in Fredericksburg within a few minutes of each other. One brought Sarah Knox from Richmond, who was about to face trial in Montross for the murder of Mrs. Roger Eastlake the previous September. The other brought her former lover and the husband of the dead woman, Roger Eastlake, who was there to take the stand against her.
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Mar 26, 2024 | 
fredericksburg.com | Wendy Migdal
On Aug. 27, 1940, readers of The Free Lance-Star would have found an unusual item of interest, if they made it down the bottom of the front page and past the other 16 articles. The headline announced that a “Famed Surrealist Artist Is Resting in Nearby County.” Salvador Dalí had come to Caroline County for what would be the first eight months of his eight-year stay in the United States.
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Feb 27, 2024 | 
fredericksburg.com | Wendy Migdal
In late February 1934, Fredericksburg residents were greeted one day by a startling headline: “Musante Girl Again Missing From Home.” A 14-year-old girl from Aquia had been reportedly abducted from her backyard early that morning as she went out to use the outhouse. Caroline was found later that night, but as the headline stated, this wasn’t the first time she had been kidnapped.
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Dec 26, 2023 | 
fredericksburg.com | Wendy Migdal
It’s time for our next installment of the Knox–Eastlake case, Colonial Beach’s most sensational murder. You may recall from October’s Retro Reads that Margaret Eastlake, a young mother of two, was found dead in her home in Colonial Beach on the morning of Sept. 30, 1921. Her husband Roger, a petty Naval officer, and a sort-of neighbor named Sarah Knox were being held in a Richmond jail, awaiting their separate trials for her murder.
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Nov 14, 2023 | 
fredericksburg.com | Wendy Migdal
As Thanksgiving draws near and the grocery stores begin to stuff their aisles with stuffing boxes, many of us begin to anticipate the food frenzy that is the fourth Thursday in November. We’re nowhere near as grateful as the Pilgrims, who had starved through that first year. We know their meal wasn’t exactly like the “traditional“ meal we eat today, and that piques our curiosity. What did Fredericksburgers eat in years past?
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Oct 10, 2023 | 
fredericksburg.com | Wendy Migdal
Very early on a Friday morning, at the very end of September 1921, a man stood dressed in a crisp white uniform on the wharf at Colonial Beach. He was waiting for the ferry to take him to work at the Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground. He wouldn’t make it there that day, or any other day, for that matter. The town police rushed up to the wharf with the news that the man’s wife had just been brutally murdered.
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Aug 29, 2023 | 
fredericksburg.com | Wendy Migdal
On any given day, a multitude of pedestrians and bicyclists safely cross the Chatham Bridge on the recently opened shared-use path. They may glance down at the river and wave to a kayaker or standup paddleboarder. A few may know that it has been nearly a hundred years since the patch of greenery that they pass over, also known as Scott’s Island, played host to a riot of summer entertainment.
