Fredericksburg Circuit Court
Circuit Court for the City of Fredericksburg
Sharron S. Mitchell, Clerk
During the history of courthouses in
Fredericksburg, Virginia, there sat many different courts. Until its incorporation
as a town in 1781 the courthouse in Fredericksburg served as the courthouse for
Spotsylvania County, of which Fredericksburg was a part. Starting in 1782 the
Fredericksburg Courthouse was the site of the Fredericksburg Hustings Court,
which continued until 1889 when the court was renamed the Corporation Court,
coinciding with Fredericksburg's newly declared status as an independent city
(no longer associated with Spotsylvania County). Due to lack of space at the
Spotsylvania Courthouse the Fredericksburg Courthouse was also used for the
Spotsylvania District Court and the series of Superior Courts to follow from
1789 until 1889.
In 1992 a program was initiated under the Virginia Circuit Court Clerks
Preservation Project to process court records papers lodged in the
Fredericksburg Courthouse for archival storage and reformatting. As part of
this program pre-1914 records are indexed on primary names after they have
been processed and placed in an archival filing system. Unique to the work in
Fredericksburg is the contribution of the Records Conservation
Project which extracts data of genealogical and / or historical note and
enters those extracts into a database also containing the indexed names. This
combined database is the basis for the Court
Records Digest.
Requests for copies of records presented in the Court Records Digest
should be mailed to :
Fredericksburg Circuit Court
P.O. Box 359
Fredericksburg, VA 22404
Please send a SASE with your request and the citation information provided in
the Digest extract. Since many of the court records contain a large number of
pages, many of which are fragile, please try to be specific as to what portion of
the record you need. A request for photocopies of the entire record may be
impossible to honor due to Clerk's office staffing limitations. Your request
will be answered by an estimate of the photocopy cost of the requested record(s).
By law (Code of Virginia) the minimum photocopy cost the Clerk is permitted to
charge is $.50 per photocopy page.
The first courthouse on the site of the current courthouse for the Circuit Court
for the City of Fredericksburg was built between 1736 and 1740. The early
courthouse was built of brick and modeled after an English town hall (similiar to
the Hanover County, Virginia, courthouse which still stands today). Among the
attorneys to practice law in the original building were James Monroe, John
Marshall and Bushrod Washington. The 1768 trial of the Baptist Dissenters may
have been the most famous trial held in the old building.
The present courthouse, designed by James Renwick in the French Gothic style,
was completed in 1852, replacing the original building which was demolished.
James Renwick later designed "The Castle" of the Smithsonian in Washington, DC,
and St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. The current courthouse has been
renovated twice - once shortly after World War II and, to a lesser extent,
in 1991/2.
The courthouse tower houses a six hundred pound bronze bell made at the Paul
Revere Foundry in Boston, one of one hundred and thirty-four surviving Revere
Foundry bells and the only known Revere bell in Virginia. The bell was donated
to the Corporation of Fredericksburg in 1828 by Silas Wood, of New York, who
married Miss Julia Ann Chew Brock of Fredericksburg in 1816.
Fredericksburg Courthouse page
created by
Barry L. McGhee
approved by Sharron S. Mitchell, Clerk
Copyright © 1996, 1997 Barry L. McGhee
last modified: September 22, 1997
URL: https://sites.rootsweb.com/~vacfrede/fch.htm
Return to the Digest.