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Next morning we took train for Fredericksburg.

The city manager who runs the town is a good housekeeper; his streets are wide, pretty, and clean; and though there are many historic buildings—­including the home of Washington’s mother and the house in which Washington became a Mason—­there are enough good new ones to give the place a progressive look.

In the days of the State’s magnificence Fredericksburg was the center for all this part of northeastern Virginia, and particularly for the Rappahannock Valley; and from pre-Revolutionary times, when tobacco was legal tender and ministers got roaring drunk, down to the Civil War, there came rolling into the town the coaches of the great plantation owners of the region, who used Fredericksburg as a headquarters for drinking, gambling, and business.  Among these probably the most famous was “King” Carter, who not only owned miles upon miles of land and a thousand slaves, but was the husband of five (successive) Mrs. Carters.

Falmouth, a river town a mile above Fredericksburg, where a few scattered houses stand to-day, was in early times a busy place.  It is said that the first flour mill in America stood there, and that one Gordon, who made his money by shipping flour and tobacco direct from his wharf to England, and bringing back bricks as ballast for his ships, was the first American millionaire.

Besides having known intimately such historic figures as Washington, Monroe, and Robert E. Lee, and having been the scene of sanguinary fighting in the Civil War, the neighborhood of Fredericksburg boasts the birth-place of a man of whom I wish to speak briefly here, for the reason that he was a great man, that he has been partially overlooked by history, and that it is said in the South that the fame which should justly be his has been deliberately withheld by historians and politicians for the sole reason that as a naval officer he espoused the southern cause in the Civil War.

Every one who has heard of Robert Fulton, certainly every one who has heard of S.F.B.  Morse or Cyrus W. Field, ought also to have heard of Matthew Fontaine Maury.  But that is not the case.  For myself, I must confess that, until I visited Virginia, I was ignorant of the fact that such a person had existed; nor have northern schoolboys, to whom I have spoken of Maury, so much as heard his name.  Yet there is no one living in the United States, or in any civilized country, whose daily life is not affected through the scientific researches and attainments of this man.

Maury’s claim to fame rests on his eminent services to navigation and meteorology.  If Humboldt’s work, published in 1817, was the first great contribution to meteorological science, it remained for Maury to make that science exact.

While it is perhaps an exaggeration to say that Maury alone laid the foundation for our present Weather Bureau, he certainly shares with Professors Redfield, Espy, Loomis, Joseph Henry, Dr. Increase Lapham, and others, the honor of having been one of the first to suggest the feasibility of our present systematic storm warnings.