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were tarred and gravelled in the 1920s, blood hounds were used to trail inmates when they broke out of the county jail and the town hit the national media when it elected an allwomen town council in 1950.
There are many, many other interesting facts about the history of the Tbwn of Washington as there are about the other villages in the county. Sperryville, for example, was first mentioned in records of Francis Thornton Jr. of Fredericksburg. He was the grandson of Francis Thornton of F.T. Valley fame and his first wife was Jane Washington Thornton, sister to George Washington Thornton from whom he inherited the land around Sperryville.
The name may come from a man named Sperry who may have built the first house there, although there is no record of that in the tax records, or may have been the operator of the stage house, in which case he would have been sent by the stage company, or may have been a friend of Thornton’s.
By 1880, the village boasted four churches, seven distillers, two hotels, one manufacturer of wool, four general stores, one saloon, 10 com and flour mills, three tanners and one physician and by 1890 had a population of 350.
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