Transcription
O The motorist, Dumfries Virginia (pop. 3900) is no northbound and southbound lanes of U.S. 1 diverge here around a series of auto shops and modest shopping strips. The only hints of the town's rich past are a Georgian mansion perched on the edge of the southbound lanes and a sign pointing the way to the Weems-Botts Museum.
Most visitors to the tiny 18th- century museum want to know "what's a Weems-Botts," says curator Ann Hoagland of Historic Dumfries Inc. Botts was Benjamine Botts, local squire and a defense lawyer in the Aaron Burr treason trial, whose law offices were here. He bought it in 1802 from preacher and book seller Mason Lock Weems, best known as Parson Weems, notorious for fabricating the George Washington Cherry-tree tale. Weems used the building as a base from which he peddled his specious histories 9other subjects included Ben Franklin and Revolutionary War guerrilla Francis "Swamp Fox" Marion).
The museum limns the lives of these and other local gentry, but even more intriguing is Dumfries' own story. Chartered in 1749 9on the same day as Alexandria0, Dumfries thrived as a tobacco port, shipping more merchandise by 1763 than New York or Philadelphia. When tobacco farming wore out the land and silted in the harbor, Dumfries- still on the King's Highway through the British colonies, now mostly U.S. 1- made a go of hosting travelers, including at the stage Coach Inn (Williams' Ordinary), the Georgian building now being restored by its owner.
Dumfries declined until the Civil War, when it became a confederate command and shipping point. The slump resumed after Appomatox. In the 1920s, some horse-owning residents supplemented their incomes by hauling cars from Rte. 1's mudholes. During the Depression, a pyrite mine failed during a labor dispute. By 1940, the WPA guid to Virginia admitted that the town of only 325 had, "dwindled to comparative nothingness."
Civil War artifacts nowadays are mostly found in the wake of developers' earthmovers- as Dumfries, now mostly a bedroom community, is on yet another upswing in its up-and-down history.Transcriber
Rachel HughesLanguage
English