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business, pleasure, culture and attractive residence. Let’s face it: The county’s villages are less vital than they were 100 years ago, and more threatened by this society’s tendency to strangle and suffocate small towns and villages in favor of suburbs, strip malls along highways and Sprawl-Marts.
This is what is going on all around us, and this is what will happen in Rappahannock, too, if we don’t deliberately and imaginatively create a different vision of this county. Instead of considering new, four-lane bypasses of our villages, we should be discussing how to make them more attractive places for small businesses and for people seeking affordable homes.
This won’t happen without some creative imagination by the County Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors. Revitalizing our towns and villages, and making them magnets for new commerce and population growth, goes hand-inhand with a strategy of preserving Rappahanrtock’s priceless landscape of farms, woods, uncluttered roads and open spaces. By making our towns and villages more attractive places in which to five, work and do business, we make it less likely that Rappahannock will wind up with four-and-six-lane highways lined both sides with franchised tickytacky.
We can’t recreate the 1890s, of course. Grist mills and wagon-makers won’t make a comeback, no matter what we do. But there are some 20th century tools we can use (and 21st Century visions we can be inspired by) that could inject new life and hope into our towns and villages.
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