The other notable early figure was Governor "Extra" Billy Smith, who got his nickname by extracting ever larger payment from the government as his mail-coach business grew. In those days, apparently, contractors ripping off the feds were considered something of a novelty.
Others who have spent some time in the area include baseball hall of famer and Culpeper native Eppa Rixey, Clara Barton, who performed her first field duty in the Battle of Cedar Mountain, George Custer, who liked the area so much that he brought his new bride here for his honeymoon, Daniel Boone, JEB Stuart, Ulysses Grant, who plotted his final campaign while in Culpeper, Walt Whitman, who served as a nurse in Culpeper, Patrick Henry, Robert E. Lee, and Lafayette. Finally, we have Richard Thompson, whom, as we all recall, was Secretary of Navy under Rutherford B. Hayes.
But aside from the Civil War, things were pretty quiet until the 1960s, during a period in which the US Department of Interior was declaring that the region one of the seven most desirable places in the nation to live. Among those who believed the department were various people collectively known as "those goddamn hippies" and a more sedate crowd of exiles from Washington including Gene McCarthy, David Brinkley, and James J. Kilpatrick.
Your editor bought some land in Peola Mills around that time. When I went in for the settlement, I was surprised to find that my attorney, Jim Bill Fletcher, representing the seller as well. I later mentioned this anomaly to a lawyer friend who reported a similar experience, during which he had been told by Fletcher, "I am the lawyer for the situation."
Rappahanock adapted well to its new diversity. I once went entered the H&J Grocery store and found a group of men drinking coffee, including a fully uniformed and armed game warden holding his coffee in one hand and a copy of Foreign Affairs in the other. I learned that Gene McCarthy had been in earlier.
As for the hippies, G. Brown Miller, from whom we bought our place, once told me, "You know, partner, your friend Erbin, is a mighty fine fellow." I agreed. "He gave me one of them marijuwana cigarettes the other day." "How'd you like it, Brown?" I asked. "Well, it seems like to me, if you've lived on moonshine all your life, it don't do much."
There was at least one other thing that happened in the region. That was back in 1960 when Lyndon Johnson was running for vice president. He was in Culpeper on the first of 47 whistle-stops between Washington and New Orleans. He talked too long and his aides instructed the engineer to start pulling slowly out. As the train began to move, LBJ cried, "And tell me, good people, what has Richard Nixon ever done for Culpeper?" An old man raised his cane and shouted back, "Hell, what has anyone ever done for Culpeper?"
ooo
On a warm September evening in 1994, approaching the corner where you turn towards Old Rag Mountain -- just this side of the Exxon station that is both on the edge and near the center of Sperryville, Virginia -- I hit a cow. The bovine miscreant had wandered from behind some bushes onto Route 237, exploded into the frame of my windshield, rolled over, careened off the front fender and scudded by, pausing only long enough to look me directly and critically in the eye. The cow then completed its original mission -- namely to cross the road and enter the pasture on the other side.
My wife Kathy and I were wearing seat-belts and so the encounter between a Plymouth Voyager doing 40 mph and a 1300-pound cow doing 2.5 left us stunned but mobile. We stepped out of the car and were soon joined by a state trooper, the local rescue squad, a fire engine, a sheriff's deputy as well as a small swarm of men wandering silently with transmitters in the night.
Having quickly, almost perfunctorily, ascertained our good health, our rescuers asked which way the cow had gone. We pointed towards the field and most of the figures in the dark, much as the cow before them, rapidly faded into the pasture as though they, too, had been interrupted in their true errand. Later, I would recall Robert Frost's ending to Out, Out - : "And they, since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs."
