For 130 years, this was a road like thousands of others. First called the County Road, then Telegraph Road, it carried farmers' 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.