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Battle of Fredericksburg • Tour the Battlefield • Monuments & Markers • Armies

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The Sunken Road wayside marker is at Stop One on the Fredericksburg battlefield driving tour. It is at the entrance to the Sunken Road just west of the Visitor Center.

From the marker:

The Sunken Road

For 130 years, this was a road like thousands of others. First called the County Road, then Telegraph Road, it carried farmer’s wagons into Fredericksburg or townsfolk to visit relatives in the country. During the 1830s an adjacent landowner built stone walls along the road as it passed below Marye’s Heights and “Brompton,” the home of John L. Marye. In the 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg, the road shed its former names and became simply the “Sunken Road,” one of the most famous byways in America.

After the Civil War, the road became a typical city street. Much of the original stone wall vanished; houses appeared. But in the 1930s, the National Park Service started reclaiming the road. The Civilian Conservation Corps reconstructed the section of wall in front of you, and the NPS removed postwar houses. In 2004 the road closed to traffic, allowing the NPS to take up its asphalt surface and rebuild the remaining portions of the wall. Today, the road looks much as it did at the time of the battle.

From the caption to the photo:
Workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps reconstruct[ing] a missing section of [the] stone wall in 1936. A section of original wall still stands at the northern end of the road.

From the map on the bottom right:
This half-mile walking tour takes you down the Sunken Road, then climbs the hill, and comes back along Marye’s Heights, concluding at the National Cemetery. Those not wishing to climb the hill may return to the parking lot along the Sunken Road.