DOWN MEMORY LANE
50 YEARS AGO
September 13, 1962
Specialist Robert E. Atkins, who is stationed with the United States Army in Worms, West Germany, has been awarded an engraved cigarette lighter and a letter of commendation for driving a military motor vehicle 15,000 accident- and incident-free miles in the command. The award and congratulations were presented by Major Kilcauley at ceremonies in Worms. Specialist Atkins is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Hugh S. Atkins Sr. of Sperryville. Announcement is made this week of a change in ownership of Rappahannock News. Basil C. Burke, attorney of Madison, has sold the newspaper and real estate to Angus M. and R. Duff Green of Culpeper and Orange. Ownership was effective Sept. 1, with last week’s issue being printed at the plant of The Orange Review, in Orange. The larger size paper of this week is expected to be continued.
25 YEARS AGO
April 23, 1987
Calling fruit production “the only viable agricultural industry for Rappahannock County right now” and insisting that local farm labor is “really a myth,” Newbill Miller led his fellow planning commissioners to a compromise recommendation on a migrant labor camp after a protracted debate at last Wednesday’s public hearing. At issue is a special exception application from orchardist Alex Sharp to expand his existing camp in Harris Hollow to house 16 migrants and allow the facility to be used year-round. (Mr. Sharp’s 1984 permit, clarified last year by the Board of Zoning Appeals, limits the camp to 10 workers and specifies that they may be housed there only during the apple harvest season.)
10 YEARS AGO
Jan. 2, 2002
America may be fascinated by fantasy and fiction, but book buyers in Rappahannock County showed a strong inclination to read history this year, judging by the bestsellers of 2001 at the Old Sperryville Bookshop. Here, based in the past year, are the 10 best selling new books of 2001: 1. “Eye of the Storm,” written and illustrated by Private Robert Knox Sneden ( hardcover, $ 37.50). This is a lost treasure of the Civil War, a beautifully packaged memoir of a Union soldier – a mapmaker and artist – and his striking watercolors of the camps, battlefields, prisons and other scenes of the conflict. Two historians of the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond tracked down Sneden’s previously undiscovered artworks and manuscript, and edited them into one of the best first- person accounts of the Civil War ever done. This book was so successful that a sequel, “Images of the Storm,” has been published, featuring many more of the 500- plus artworks he produced . . . [ A decade after the preceding was published, Sneden’s story was featured on a Civil War Trails marker in Woodville; see the box above.]