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BY DON AUDETTE
Rappahannock News Contributing Writer
No one knows what Rappahannock County was really like in the year 1900. Or in 1873, or 1937, or any other year for that matter. But for the Year 2000, this county has a chance to record itself as much as it wants for posterity.
People in the future, in 2015, 2057, or 2093 and beyond, would really appreciate some kind of record of what Rappahannock County looked like the Year 2000, what people were doing, their everyday experiences, and especially the human side of things.
Historians and your descendants will thrive on this type of information. The record would be in the form of photos, writing, videotapes, collections of things, oral history - anything that would serve as a benchmark for how things were at the start of the new century and the new Millennium in Rappahannock County. Nothing like this has ever been done before. It would be a first.
How would it work? For one thing, it would be totally voluntary. You would have a whole year to do something. Everything would end up in the Rappahannock County Library in a special archive available for public use in the future (the Library has agreed to house the collection).
Recording what the county is like in the Year 2000 would be open to any individual, family, county government organization, any business, store, church, school, artist, nonprofit organization, or group. You name it. Who would be contributing?
They could be a weekender, the County Administrator’s Office, a fence builder, a typical or non-typical family, a gas station, the fifth grade at school, The Lunch Bunch, a lawyer, a would-be poet, sitting on the front porch taking in a stunning sunset and, with unfurrowed brow, writing bad haiku, a realtor, a group of neighbors, a Post Office, a home business, a village, a musical group.
Examples? There are about 40 different governmental organizations in the county: the Board of Supervisors, the animal warden, the food stamp program, the magistrates’ office, the landfill, the elementary school and the high school, the sheriff’s office, and on and on.
Maybe there are one or two people, or more, in some of these organizations who would be interested in taking pictures of their operations and the staff, writing about the human aspect of their job, providing some sample forms or statistics, or writing about what they think of the county, or of the future.
There are about 3,000 households in the county. Maybe a few would take pictures of their homes, their families, their property, keep a diary of a year's events, or be innovative about recording their lives in Rappahannock County in the Year 2000. It would their legacy to the future, giving a realistic insight into what it was like to be in a family here at the start of the new century.
There are the twelve classes in the school system. Maybe each class could record what they would like to know about themselves 40 or 50 or more years in the future: what the teachers looked like, the courses they took, the activities, sports, good times and bad times, values, jargon, fads, music, their perception of the county. High school seniors might add things such as working off their angst on why they can’t wait to get away from the county to the supposedly real world outside, the cities, maybe other countries. Or why they plan to stay.
Businesses might take photos of their places of work, inside and out; their staff, or write about their common everyday experiences, their customers, odd, funny, strange vignettes of their life in the business.
Non profits could document what they do, why
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