Matthew Fontaine Maury School

The school that bears Matthew Fontaine Maury's name stands on ground that was once a potter's field. Before construction in 1919, the city reinterred the graves — longtime residents say the area was known as the Colored Cemetery — to Shiloh Cemetery. The site sat within Liberty Town, a Black settlement that formed after the Civil War. Phillip Stern, who designed many of Fredericksburg's institutional buildings, drew up the plans.

The building opened in 1920 as Fredericksburg High School. In 1937, an identical structure connected by a covered walkway went up for James Monroe Elementary School, and the original became James Monroe High School. When the city built a new high school in 1952, the building took Maury's name and served elementary and middle school students until 1980. After that, it housed a police academy and a homeless shelter before becoming condominiums in 2007.

Maury Stadium, built in 1935, sits below the school. Despite two new high schools rising elsewhere, James Monroe teams still play there. For decades, the stadium hosted the Fredericksburg Dog Mart, a trading event that began in 1698 between the settlement and the Pamunkey Indians. The Dog Mart drew 15,000 people by 1949. The stadium still serves as the largest public gathering place in the city.

Maury himself was born in Spotsylvania County in 1806. After a stagecoach accident ended his time at sea, he studied wind and current patterns from old ships' logs at the Naval Observatory. His *Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic* cut voyage times by showing captains how to ride the ocean's currents. He resigned his U.S. Navy commission when the Civil War began and joined the Confederacy, spending the war developing naval mines and seeking diplomatic recognition in Europe. He returned to the United States in 1868, taught physics at the Virginia Military Institute, and died at home in Lexington in 1873.