Fredericksburg is a rapidly growing community located midway between Washington D.C. and Richmond, Virginia. In the nineteenth century, a railway connecting those two great cities became the logistics infrastructure for Civil War armies. Consequently, Fredericksburg’s wartime experience proved harsh and enduring. The Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park includes thousands of acres of battlefield land at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Court
House. The scope of that era’s historic events, however, extends well beyond the limits of a national park.

When I became a city planner in the late 1980s, two Fredericksburg City Council members let me know there were battlefields within the city limits that were outside the boundaries of the National Military Park. Fredericksburg sits astride Interstate 95 and those places were rapidly being developed. We planners were encouraged to see if certain areas could be formally identified and preserved, because many of those unprotected battlefields had already been obliterated around the I-95/VA Rt. 3 interchange. Over the years, we worked to balance development with the preservation of historic resources.

National Park Service historians have routinely collected archival material related to the full scope of the area’s Civil War history. They have also located house sites and other battlefield landmarks outside their holdings. My work for this book built on those early efforts, but forensic geography takes time. Terrain is substantially altered by earth moving and construction, as well as by natural processes such as erosion and renewed vegetation. Figuring out the contours and character of the 1863 landscape entailed the use of old maps, draft sketches for old maps, contemporary descriptions, and careful study of the existing land.

That effort resulted in The Forgotten Battles of the Chancellorsville Campaign: Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and Banks’ Ford.