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once used by the family for storage.
“The building used to be a tavern with three stories and porches on the front, but the porches had to be taken off for the road to go through," Miss Jenkins said. “Then the building was unsightly, so they took off the top two stories.”
Miss Jenkins’ father bought the property because it was, and is, located across Main Street from the Jenkins home. “We just started using it for storage space then,” Miss Jenkins said.
Although she continued to clip and save information in scrapbooks, Miss Jenkins soon was acquiring all sorts of artifacts and antiques. The oldest article on display in the museum is a booklet of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia dated 1801. There is also a tombstone on the museum grounds dated 1792 for the daughter of the Mr. Porter that Porter Street in Washington was named after.
Other articles found at the museum include antique clothes, newspaper clippings, copies of The Blue Ridge Guide from 1908 and 1911, many old magazines and other papers, cooking utensils, books, furniture and baskets. A complete list of the museum’s contents can not be given here, but Miss Jenkins has organized the articles into a kitchen area, a school room and a historical room.
All of the pieces are interesting, but some that are among the more unusual are a quilt made out of old horse show and fair ribbons, tickets to a concert held to raise money for the Civil War memorial in town, a battleship flag, a calendar from 1896, a teacher’s roll book from 1890 and the geneology of Rappahannock County traced back to 1634.
The rooms are filled with antiques of every shape and form, and Miss Jenkins continues to add on to the collection. She has recently acquired a Civil War keystone that was found while a road in Culpeper was being built.
Besides the pieces that belong to the Jenkins family, the museum has some articles that were donated, some that were borrowed and some that the Jenkins’ bought at auctions. “Usually the things we wanted at auctions, no one else would be interested in,” Miss Jenkins said. “I’ve paid 50 cents for old wooden ironing boards, and my mother bought the set-back safe for $1.50.”
Miss Jenkins likes all of the artifacts and antiques, but her main interest remains in the clippings and histories. She has WPA homes and graves books, a scrapbook on the
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