In describing the town in 1841, an intelligent visitor says "Fredericksburg is regularly laid out and compactly built; many of its buildings are brick. The principal public buildings are a courthouse, clerk's office, a jail, a market-house, an orphan asylum, one Episcopal, one Presbyterian, one Methodist, one Baptist and one Reform Baptist church. The town also contains two banks and one male and one female seminary of the higher class. It is supplied with water from the river[24] by subterraneous pipes and is governed by a Mayor and Common Council. A canal, extending from the town to Fox's mill, a point on the Rappahannock, thirty-five miles above, has been commenced and partly completed. "Fredericksburg enjoys considerable trade, chiefly in grain, flour, tobacco, maize, etc., and considerable quantities of gold are exported. Its exports have been computed at over four millions of dollars annually. The falls of the Rappahannock, in the vicinity, afford good water power. There were in 1840, by the United States statistics, seventy-three stores, with a capital of $376,961; two tanneries, paints, drugs, etc., with a capital of $37,000; one grist mill, two printing offices, four semi-weekly newspapers; capital in manufactures, $141,200; five academies, with 256 students, and seven schools, with 156 scholars. The population in 1830, whites, 1,797; slaves, 1,124; free blacks, 387--total, 3,308. The population in 1840 was 3,974." But the commercial prosperity of the town even in 1840 was not equal to its advantages, but it steadily grew and prospered during the next decade. The completion of a canal, extending from the town to a point on the Rappahannock river, a distance of forty miles, railroad facilities and river navigation by sail vessels and steamboats, greatly enlarged her commercial advantages and increased her export trade, and the beginning of the year 1850 found her enjoying a degree of material prosperity, presaging a glorious commercial future. Commencing the year 1850 under circumstances so encouraging, the next decade was expected to exceed in all departments of trade the preceding one. The failure to build a railroad through the section of country from which the bulk of our trade was drawn, and the substitution therefor of a plank road, with the building of the Orange and Alexandria railroad, now the Western, and the advance of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad along the upper line of the Shenandoah Valley, greatly injured the trade of Fredericksburg by diverting from her a large amount of produce, which was formerly brought to town in wagons, and while in 1860 the population had somewhat increased, the general trade of the town was diminished. THE CORPORATE LIMITS EXTENDED.