History Thursday: 305 Prince Edward Street
Home holds stories about the free Black and immigrant experience in 19th- and 20th-century Fredericksburg.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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Free Blacks, including a doctor and a blacksmith, and immigrants from Germany and Ireland—one of them a single female business owner—were among the 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century owners of this lot on Prince Edward Street.
According to research conducted by Roger Engels in October of 2022 for the Historic Fredericksburg Foundation, Inc.’s marker program, James Ferguson, a blacksmith listed in historic court records as a “free Negro” or “free mulatto,” bought the lot in 1795. Ferguson owned several other properties in the area, including 306 Charles Street, which he built.
Andrew Monroe, also listed in court records as a “free Negro” and described as a doctor, bought the lot from Ferguson. Engels notes that the sale may have been an “informal arrangement” between Monroe and Ferguson, who helped many of his friends and neighbors become property owners.
In 1846, a German immigrant named Jacob Fries—also spelled Friez or Frieze—bought the lot and the house that sat on it. According to his April 13, 1869, obituary in the Fredericksburg Ledger titled “An Old Soldier Gone,” “Old Jacob Friez” had served in Napoleon’s army in 1812, participated in the “perilous campaign” in Russia and witnessed the burning of Moscow before coming to the United States.
In Fredericksburg, he “pursued the humble vocation of basket maker” and “by industry and thrift … acquired a little house in the suburbs”—the house that first stood at 305 Prince Edward Street. Sadly, this house burned during “the bombardment,” or the Battle of Fredericksburg.
Fries died “at the advanced age, as near as we can gather, of 95 years,” according to the Ledger article. A later news article about him published in 1896 in the Free Lance states that he not only served in Napoleon’s army but acted as the general’s bodyguard.
“His military experience was most interesting, told even in his imperfect English, which he delighted to relate,” the article states. “He died in Fredericksburg some twenty years ago, at a very advanced age, and was buried in the City Cemetery. His grave was marked by a wooden board until recently, when it decayed, and now there is nothing to tell the passerby whose remains lie buried there. The grave of such a soldier should be marked and his identity preserved.”
Fries sold the 305 Prince Edward Street lot—now missing a house—to Francis McEntee, an Irish immigrant, for $20 in 1866. McIntee appears in the 1870 census as a brickmaker, according to Engels, “which may explain his use of building material” to construct the brick structure that still stands at this location “in a neighborhood of frame houses.”
The next owner of the house was Elizabeth McDougal, who also immigrated to the U.S. from Ireland. According to her 1891 obituary in the Free-Lance, she was born in the County of Wicklow and came to the U.S. in 1829, landing in Philadelphia, where she lived before arriving in Fredericksburg in 1835.
Elizabeth McDougal bought 305 Prince Edward in 1876 for $700. She bought the house as a single woman, having divorced her husband Michael in 1866 on the grounds that he deserted her ten years previously, according to historic court records.
“Her purchase, with no mention of a husband, indicates an independence unusual for most women of that time,” Engels wrote. McDougal operated several businesses, including a grocery and an “ordinary,” or tavern. On at least one occasion, she was charged with selling alcohol without a license, according to Fredericksburg historic court records.
When she died at age 81, the Free Lance described her as “one of the oldest and most widely known citizens of Fredericksburg.”
She willed 305 Prince Edward to her daughter, who sold it in 1891 to David Hirsh, who immigrated to the U.S. from Germany with his family when he was a child. According to Hirsh’s 1941 obituary in the Free Lance-Star, he lived in Fredericksburg from the time he was five years old until his death, including through the battle of Fredericksburg, which was fought when he was 11.
“His family was living on the 400 block of William Street, present location of the Blue Grill. The family took shelter in the basement of the house but emerged from time to time to witness the shelling. Young David saw a shell strike the chimney of the building on Prince Edward Street that is now the home of Dr. John E. Cole,” the obituary read.
As an adult, Hirsh opened a feed business with his son, Simon. In 1929, the Free Lance-Star noted that the business was “given very favorable national publicity in the current issue of the Dealers Purinagraph, a house magazine published by Purina Mills.”
“It’s a rare quarter that the name of David Hirsh and Son isn’t up among the list of quota winners, an outstanding honor among Purina dealers,” the magazine wrote, according to the article.
In 1941, Hirsh, then 88 and described as the “oldest member of the Jewish faith in Fredericksburg,” participated in the groundbreaking ceremony for a Hebrew temple for the Beth Sholom Congregation at the corner of Charlotte Street and Kenmore Avenue.
After Simon Hirsh sold 305 Prince Edward in 1953 to Robert Thompson, an executive with a local heating and air conditioning business, who owned it until 1971. Between then and 1991, it “passed through a series of real estate investors, most of whom, with few exceptions, held it for only a few years,” Engels wrote. More recently, it has been owner occupied.
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