If walls could talk

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If ] you have the book Images of America, Rappahannock County, which is a book of photographs of the County put together by Kathryn Lynch, I am sure that the cover photograph is your Rappahannock News building in an earlier incarnation. (The photograph wraps around the spine and part of the back cover).

Your building was first located on Gay Street where the old Rappahannock National Bank building is now. (Note that Jett Street does not appear on the right side of the building in the photograph).

It was a house owned by John Jett Sr. in 1835. The location of the windows and scalloping of the roofline are features of your building now.

The house served as a drug store, then as John Dulin’s saloon in 1885-1897 and then as a barroom owned by George G. Bywaters in 1897-1900. In 1900 it housed a branch of the Farmers and Merchants Bank and from 1903 to about 1910 it housed the new Rappahannock National Bank.

The building was moved to Jett and Main streets in about 1910 where it continued to serve as the bank until a new bank building made of brick was constructed on the original parcel of land on Gay Street. Information from Rappahannock County Land Books indicate that the new bank building was constructed in 1914-1915, when the value of the building on the Gay Street property increased from $380 to $1950.

After that it served as the Post Office until the mid-1950s.

When Main Street was widened and macadamized in the 1930s, the front porch on Main Street was removed and the front door was moved to the Jett Street side of the building.

This is all from my research for my upcoming book Washington, Virginia, A History, 1735-2018.

Maureen Harris

Woodville Editor’s note: Harris, a noted historian, is a researcher for the Rappahannock Historical Society.