Rappahannock in 2025: An exercise in imagination, in which the past becomes the future
(Editor’s Note: The cover story of The Washington Post Magazine of April 27 presented a speculative look into the future of the D.C. Metro area, circa 2025. That got our imaginative juices flowing about how change will shape the Rappahannock County of that year. Caveat: This is an exercise in imagination, not prediction. Readers with alternative imaginations of the county’s future are welcome to offer them as comments, below.)
By James P. Gannon
Barry Clatterbuck, a muscular 17-year-old who works as a stock boy at the Organic Farm Market on Route 211, in what once was Rappahannock County High School, does not remember what the county was like in the year he was born, 2008.
He’s heard his folks tell about how rich city people used to be chauffeured out to dinner at The Inn at Little Washington, but that was long before gasoline went to $12 a gallon and the Inn closed during the long recession of 2008-2011, when he was a mere toddler.
Barry was born on election day in 2008 and named after newly-elected President Obama, whose ill-fated administration was doomed by the double disasters of economic distress and terrorist attack–the forces that had so much to do with reshaping quiet, rural Rappahannock County.
The three-year recession, triggered by the collapse of housing values, and the explosion in oil prices that followed the Islamic Brotherhood’s overthrow of the Saudi royal family, killed tourist and leisure travel during Barry’s boyhood, ruining a key underpinning of the county’s economy. After the Inn closed in bankruptcy, and the shops and B&Bs in the former county-seat town went out of business, Washington became a village of old people living in aged houses with very high sewer bills.
It was fortunate, however, that this dark period lasted only five years and led to the revival of Rappahannock’s economy as D.C.’s organic backyard garden. Soaring food prices in the 2010s, compounded by fuel costs that made it uneconomic to truck farm produce long distances or to import food from abroad, created conditions that turned Rappahannock into an agricultural powerhouse.
The scores of big organic farms that blanket the valleys and foothills of Rappahannock today sprang to life to answer Metro Washington’s need for locally grown fruits, vegetables, and grass-fed meat. Ironically, it was economic distress and the oil crisis that brought Rappahanock County full circle: Back to its history as an agricultural economy.
Barry Clatterbuck is old enough to remember one key element of this change that happened when he was a young boy. That’s when the 8,000-acre Lane Industries properties were sold to California’s E. & J. Gallo Winery. The Gallo vineyards and winery, covering most of the southern third of Rappahannock, became the East Coast’s largest producer of wines and Rappahannock’s largest employer.
Rappahannock’s largest community–Fletchertown–sprang up in the F.T. Valley to house the hundreds of Gallo employees and their families, who live in the innovative cluster-development affectionately known to locals as “Billville.”
Such a development would have been barred by the county’s tight zoning laws when Barry was born, but after the Gallos, dangling jobs and economic revival, came to the county, the zoning laws quickly got flexible.
The rapid expansion of organic farming, with its need for seasonal labor, greatly increased demand for affordable housing for the thousands of Mexican farmworkers who came into the U.S. each growing season under the revived federal “bracero” program, championed by then-Vice President Hillary Clinton with her “Hill-visas.” And so Fletchertown boomed.
The Gallos also were responsible for the one aspect of tourism that survived and thrived in Rappahannock. On weekends, the Rappahannock Wine Train brings hundreds of tourists to the Gallo winery and the shops, bodegas and cantinas of Fletchertown. There they imbibe, dance to mariachi music and spend their money before reboarding the distinctive burgundy-and-gold train back to D.C.
The wine train was a logical outgrowth of the coming of the railroads to Rappahannock, starting in 2010. All it took was a spur line from the Amissville Yards to Fletchertown. Nobody would have guessed in 2010 that Amissville would become a major railroad center. After Norfolk Southern Railway announced plans for its Front Royal-to-Culpeper line, the terrorist attacks of 2011 rapidly accelerated railroading’s impact on the economy and landscape of Rappahannock.
The coordinated terrorist attacks on chemical-laden tank-car trains near Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington on Sept. 11, 2011, caused more than 8,000 deaths from the chlorine clouds that devastated the three cities. Congress demanded that rail lines be rerouted away from big cities, which led to the massive Federal RailSafe program that brought the Norfolk Southern and CSX main lines through Rappahannock and the huge freight yards at Amissville.
It was inevitable then, that Amissville would become a thriving railroad town. Thus, two 19th Century industries–agriculture and railroads–reshaped the face of Rappahannock, and redistributed its population. With jobs and housing centered on Amissville and Fletchertown, it made sense to build the two new high schools–Rappahannock East and Rappahannock West–in those two large communities.
That’s how the old RCHS became the Organic Farm Market, where Barry Clatterbuck works now. It’s on the Amissville-to-Fletchertown spur line used by the wine train, which always makes a stop at the farm market, where the happy train passengers load up on fresh fruits, vegetables and meat on the evening train back to DC.
Barry’s job is to load big crates of farm produce into refrigerated freight cars attached to the end of the train, during its half-hour stop at the market. His dad and mom both went to high school in these same buildings. But that was a long time ago, and Barry can hardly imagine that this wasn’t always just a whistle-stop for the wine train.
-- James P. GannonComments
Comment from Steve Border
Time: April 29, 2008, 3:35 pm
Kind of Cute! But sounds a bit too much like the Bush Administrations Fear and Loathing technique Jim….
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Comment from robert legge
Time: April 29, 2008, 8:19 pm
You forgot to add the part about the
local govt. revenue cash cow of certified organic
marijuana grown on all the flat land not
occupied by organic veggies and grapes.
Rappawacky brand marijuana became a worldwide
best seller. Thanks to all the excise taxes,
real estate taxes were gradually phased out
by 2020. In fact, Rapp. Co. was so flush with tax
money it was able to fully fund the schools
with local money only. No longer was there
a need for state or federal money so they were
able to run their schools the way they wanted
with no SOL or NCLB mandates.
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