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By John Tole
Special to the
Rappahannock News
When does a resident of any place change from a ‘come here’ to a ‘been here’? How many generations must a family be present before the moniker can be changed? 50 years? A hundred or more? For some Rappahannock residents the ties to this place we all call home go back much further. Among these local folks are the descendents of the Germanna colonists, those Germans who came to the Virginia Piedmont in the early 1700s. They have familiar county names such as Aylor, Busckner, Carpenter, Dotson, Finks, Hackley, Hitt, Jenkins, Kilby, Martin, Poe, Racer. Riley, Rudasill, Swindle, Taylor, Utz, Weaver & Yeager.
The first wave of these settlers came to the New World in 1714 to mine silver and iron as they had done in their native Germany. There were about 40 of them and they would form the first community at Germanna, the area surrounding the fork of the Rappahannock and Rapidan Rivers. The Germanna Community College, on present day Route 3 between Culpeper and Fredericksburg, stands in the midst of this region and serves as a reminder of these immigrants who formed what was once the western most settlement in British America.
This small, hearty group was joined in 1717 by a second ‘wave’ of German settlers.
Unlike their predeces
66.6%