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By D< »n Ai’dktte
Special to the Rappahannock News
Time to savor a cup of coffee and drop back a century to 1909 or thereabouts in Sperryville. Everything may seem familiar. There was a major financial panic in 1907; ours started in 2007. There was trouble on the Mexican border, as there is now; Korea was a problem and still is; anarchists were the equivalent to today’s terrorists; new military technology was being fielded; and even The Blue Ridge Guide, which was the Rappahannock News of its day, had an almost full-page spread in early 1912 entitled “Amazing Spread of Islamism.”
Sperryville in 1909 was about the same size, layout, and population as it is today. But instead of computers, il\xis, cell phones, and TVs, the big thing in 1909 was macadam roads, steel bridges, and a budding “railroad fever." Muddy dirt roads back then were equivalent to dial-up today: slow, clogged, and an impediment to progress.
One priority was steel bridges. Less than a decade earlier, The Washington Poet of October 21, 1898, earned a news item noting “all the bridges from Sperryv ille to Little Washington have been washed away.” The cause* was said
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