They usually pick up a copy of the

They usually pick up a copy of the “Walking Tour of Washington. ”

We also have two discriptions of the town of Washington, one written in the 1930’s and one in the early 1980’s.

From an unnamed government engineer, quoted in F.C. Baggarly’s The History of the Town of Washington, Va." I little imagined that within a few hours of the capital of this nation, there was and is another Washington rich in beauty and in lore. I am told it antedates our national capital by more than one-half century. It is surveryed and platted and its lots are numbered and its streets are named. Notwithstanding the years it claims existence, its street lines are consistently preserved and its lots without exception maintain their original numbers and identity. It was unexpected and most interesting to find here in the Piedmont mountains of Virginia a town with blocks and streets scaled to city standards. It must have been located and surveyed by a magician, or it was a freak of nature that all the streets have a natural drainage to the intersections. Above all this —great mountain peaks look down. I cannot believe that this old town is without history."

The second quote is from Ned and Elisabeth Johnson’s History of Rappahannock County in the chapter on towns. This section was written by Dorothy Davis. “A serenity abides in the streets of Washington. It is a legacy of an earlier time, created by buildings that blend into one another with complementary materials, colors, and scale, (my emphasis). The simple visual of windows, doorways, and restrained ornamentation produce a feeling of calm and security that contrasts with the rapid traffic on the by pass.”

These two passages were written 50 years apart. It is the Historical Society’s earnest hope that these two paragraphs will still describe the town of Wasington 25 years from now.

HELEN L. HOLSCHUH

Historian, Rappahannock

Historical Society

Washington