John Paul Jones House

At 28, John Paul had killed a mutinous crew member in Tobago and fled to avoid trial. He reached Virginia sometime after 1772 with his fortune abandoned and a warrant hanging over him. He added "Jones" to his name — Wikipedia mentions a North Carolina tradition that he took it from Willie Jones of Halifax, though no one knows for certain — and settled in Fredericksburg, where his older brother William had married and made a home.

The house on Caroline Street belonged to William. John Paul Jones lived there. That much the historical record confirms. It's the only American address historians can verify as his residence, as opposed to lodgings or borrowed quarters. William later died in Fredericksburg without immediate family, and Jones returned to settle his brother's affairs.

In 1775, Jones met Joseph Hewes and other revolutionary leaders in Philadelphia. With help from Richard Henry Lee and members of the Continental Congress, he was appointed first lieutenant aboard the newly converted frigate USS Alfred on December 7, 1775. He was still a Virginia resident when he joined the Continental Navy. It was aboard Alfred, in February 1776, that he first hoisted the Continental Union Flag over a naval vessel.

A bronze tablet on the Caroline Street house — installed in 1911 by the Daughters of the American Revolution — reads: "This tablet marks the only home in America of John Paul Jones. He was appointed a lieutenant in the Continental Navy while still a resident of Virginia." The marker went up more than a century after his death. By then, the man who became the "Father of the American Navy" had been buried in Paris, exhumed, mummified in alcohol, identified by Teddy Roosevelt's ambassador, and re-interred at Annapolis in a bronze sarcophagus. His brother William rests in St. George's Cemetery in Fredericksburg. Local historians note that a John Jones headstone, dated 1752, stands thirty feet away — it's said that seeing the stone may have inspired the surname, though no one can prove it.

The house is private now. You can't go in. But you can stand on Caroline Street and look at the building where the man who said "I have not yet begun to fight" once lived with his brother, before the war, before the fame, when he was still a fugitive trying to decide what came next.