The Old Stone Warehouse

It's one block off of main street in old downtown Fredericksburg.  We had decided to to walk out onto the bridge over the Rappahannock to see if there would be a good photo op:

Not bad.  Lest you look at this and say, "What was so hard about building a pontoon bridge over this puddle," the land you see on the left is actually an island.  The widest part of the river is on the other side.  Yeah, definitely a call for LOTS of pontoons...

On the way back I notice a cool lookin' building on the left:

Notice, from the back, it's three stories high plus the attic.  When I got perfectly even with the back wall I could see it was bowed out considerably, but it looked solid enough.  However, look at it from the front - it's one story high.

This I've got to figure out, so we go inside.  What a treasure we find!

The story goes, this was built around 1770 as a warehouse.  It's right on the river which makes off-loading supplies super easy.  It is not only built of stone, but the roof is made of slate shingles - essentially ROCK shingles - so it is going to be next to impossible to burn - good plan for a warehouse, but also a good way to survive a war.  Ah, but what about a direct hit from cannon?  Check this out:

You can see where a cannonball came in through the attic, dropped through the wood flooring of each story, all the way down to the brick basement floor and blew a hole in the bricks - but that's all it did! 

You can see from the basement photo that they've been excavating layers of mud that was brought in through many floods in the past 240 years.  (There's a clue here to the number of stories front and back.) The artifacts that they recovered are upstairs in display cases.  Nothing phenomenal, but pretty cool nonetheless.

(Remember, you can click on the picture, and it should enlarge.)  

The top photo of artifacts shows a solid 16-pound cannonball like the one that came through the attic, and it shows an exploded shell filled with shrapnel (marble-size pieces of iron) intended to, well, do what shrapnel does!  (Did you know shrapnel got its name from its inventor, Henry Shrapnel?  He was a British artillery officer and invented the exploding cannonball in 1784.  Ah, the trivia I impart...)  So, anyway, the Rappahannock River continues to give up artifacts to this day - because there is so very much TO give up.

Back to the mystery of one-story vs. four stories...  It seems that every time the river floods and washes out the bridge, the city of Fredericksburg builds the new bridge higher.  Well, every time the bridge got higher, the city had to raise the road just as high, thus covering up all but the highest level of the front of the warehouse.  What was the third floor is now the first floor!

This is what I would call a very "raw" tourist stop - and one of my favorite kind.  It's only open May through mid-December because the guy who finally convinced the city to lease it to him is a "snowbird."  (He goes south for the winter.)

One thing that he did have that I have never seen before is known as an 1899 "Black Eagle" silver-certificate dollar.  It's also called a "horse blanket" because it's 25% larger than our bills today. That's what caught my eye - it's size.

I'm having computer trouble today and can't manage to flip this photo, but you can see the "black eagle."  The owner had a price tag of $195.00 - but an Internet search shows one in pristine condition going for $30,000 !!  If I had the $195 to spare I would have bought it because it is the most unique piece of currency I've seen since the $20 gold piece.  If this computer keeps acting up I'm gonna buy something a lot more useful than old currency and put THIS thing in an artifact case somewhere!