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By Jeanne Spath
Rappahannock News Staff Writer
In this day and time, most people of Rappahannock County are too busy to keep up with the present, let alone take a look into the past.
Washington attorney Doug Baumgardner took the members of the Culpeper Minute Men Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution back 148 years last week, weaving pictures in the minds of those present with a spell-binding story — a Rappahannock trial.
The story began in a time when the roads in the Tbwn of Washington were laid out the same as today, but dirt covered where pavement now lies.
No automobiles traveled past and there was no running water or electricity in the homes. There were also no railroads in Rappahannock County.
Instead, people strolled the streets while sheep and cattle grazed the mountainside all around the town.
There were no movie theaters, no bowling alleys and no fast food joints in which to loiter.
The entertainment of 18571859 was found in the court system, the theater for the community dramas.
“We now move into a drama of illicit love, sex, an unwanted pregnancy, the secret birth of a stillborn baby and a murder,” Baumgardner began, his audience spellbound.
The chronicler of the events that unfolded was very possibly Horatio Gates Moffett, a former Rappahannock County commonwealth’s attorney, who was not in office at the time of the trial of James H. Johnson.
Johnson was 36 years old, the son of a prominent Rappahannock County family, with
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