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friends introduced me to the county seat, I wondered anew that the town of Washington had never outgrown surveyor George Washington's original 1749 plat.
Gradually, a vague sense of wonder grew into a persistent curiosity at the uniqueness of Rappahannock County. Just what was going on there? No traffic light? Not even a supermarket? How was it possible that an entire county of 266 square miles could exist unsullied by the mainstays of modem American culture and consumerism only seventyfive miles from the capital of the most powerful nation on the planet-and could do so in relative anonymity? I wanted to find out.
Six months of research, including more than two dozen personal interviews with local citizens, yielded the rich historical details and colorful anecdotes that shape the larger story of Rappahannock County. I lost myself for hours in the 1950s "petticoat politics" of vivacious Dotsie Davis and "the girls," the town of Washington's first woman mayor and her all-woman town council. Up to my elbows in newspaper and magazine clippings at the Rappahannock Historical Society, I relived those giddy days when Mayor Davis announced to a writer from Collier's, "We intend to put this town on the map."
Even so, it was as late as 1984 when the Rappahannock National Bank began assigning numbers to customer accounts. Before that, the bank identified each savings and checking account by the account holder's name alone. I learned this fact and many others from talking with the locals.
For example, apple orchards dominated county agriculture at one time, and
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