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told to always be a little wary of the gypsies but I don’t know of any real damage they ever did.”
Will Gentry of Flint Hill said that there was a gypsy family that always stayed at the rock quarry on the old road through Flint Hill (where the Aileen plant is now). They made willow furniture there and sold it, he remembers. Gentry thinks that they made it right there at their camp. The furniture was sold by most gypsies who came through Rappahannock. Sometimes the seats were hickory and the rest of the chair was willow with fanciful twists of ivy or honeysuckle around the poles. “This is not the willow that you find in yards-the weeping willow,” said Aubrey Keyser. “This would be the willow that grows down by the streams and creeks.
“It wasn’t painted, it was natural brown,” said Ruby Jenkins. “And they made flower boxes out of the same material. The chairs were mostly rockers, porch furniture.” These chairs are what auctioneers call “gypsy rockers.” They’re just like the Adirondack twisted pole furniture distinctive to that region.
A Front Royal antique dealer said that people there told him that the gypsies would sell the chairs to local people, then pick them back up and load them the night they left. It was easy for them to reclaim the chairs since most people put them on their porches, he said. Rappahannock people who bought gypsy rockers never had that experience, and the rustic furniture is popular in antique stores today.
Anne and Aubrey Keyser both remember the years the gypsies camped near Washington. “They camped down at Bagley’s Mill,” Aubrey said. “They never came during the winter, only in the summer. They cooked in giant cauldrons, danced and played music at night, sharpened knives, fixed pots and pans and mended stoves.” But the main thing the gypsies did was trade horses, Aubrey said, and they were shrewd horsemen and traders.
“It’s true that they often got the better of the local men in trades,” Aubrey said. “But that was the purpose of trading — horses, knives, guns — anything.”
Aubrey tells a story about Will Oden, who ran a stable in Washington, behind where the Inn is now: “Well, Oden was trading back and forth, back and forth with the gypsies, first one horse then back again for another. They told a story on him - he thought he was a pretty shrewd trader, but they told that b&ended up paying $180
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