OK- I am a bum. I freely admit it. I was still toasted from the road, spent Friday trying to recover from being awake in all the small hours of Friday morning. I took my time getting down to the Farm on Saturday, luxuriating in the magnificence of the sun and final banishment of the winter that pursued us across the Midwest.

I slept a decent amount Saturday night, and rose to another extraordinary day in Culpeper. There were all kinds of wonderful chores I could do, bushes to trim, pastures to cut, and bright resolve spread across my eager visage as I strode boldly out to the great room to make the coffee.

Of course. I could go to Gordonsville and bag the chores, sample some of the countryside, do something cultural and have some legendary BBQ. Easy.

So, you ask: why Gordonsville? That requires a two-part response. First, Lovely Jamie told us the Exchange BBQ restaurant, a facility renowned for the excellence of its pork shoulder and beef briskets, was the real deal and a must visit.

The other reason was that we had family context in the little town. The Irish had arrived in Alexandria from County Galway in 1848, and hired on as navvies, building the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, which was pushing south toward a junction with the Central Virginia line, where it eventually arrived in 1856.

The O’Socotras needed the work, and made the right turn at Gordonsville to push to the west toward Nashville, Tennessee.

So, those two factors drove the decision to take a Sunday drive. In a larger sense, Gordonsville is reflective of the history of the region. If Culpeper had the sad distinction of being host to two warring Armies, back to back, the soldiers eating and consuming all around them like an infestation of locusts.

Gordonsville escaped that fate, and was not put to the torch like most of the villages in the bread-basket of the Confederacy, the fertile fields of the Shenandoah Valley. Spike and I had avoided the madness of Northern Virginia by driving the Rambler out of the area on Rt. 522, the Zach Taylor Highway, and that was the Key to Gordonsville in a nutshell. It was the east-west and north-south junction of the old trading routes, and when the iron horse arrived, where the rails were laid. A grand junction, if you will.

I threw on my sunglasses and set out a little before noon. Google Maps told me it was about 22 miles as the crow flies, 36 minutes with traffic that I did not expect to see, and I went down to the Winston Store and veered off on State Rt. 615 down through Mitchells. It is pleasant country: dotted with large estates that once might have been plantations, and the Correctional Facility at Coffeewood that probably is not correcting a damn thing.

The village of Rapidan is worth a look, with a couple grand old churches still in use and the river there being big enough there to power turbines, and the forlorn abandoned Mill that once harnessed that renewable source of power to the engine of commerce.

That is where some of the Shenandoah’s bounty was processed in bulk to get to the Orange & Alexandria, though now on hard times. People still believe, and the two living churches in town are well kept and pious.

It is another few miles down to Orange, the seat of Orange County, population 33,000, and cute as shit. If I had not been a man on a mission for real BBQ, I might have stopped for a drink a CJ’s on Byrd Street, and will one of these days. Montpelier, the former home of President James Madison is just down Rt. 20 from there. Highly recommended.

I pressed on to US Rt. 15, the major north south artery that would take me into Gordonville, paralleling the tracks that my ancestors had pounded into the ties. It is a nice four lane, most of the way, and at the circle, a quick whip-around gets you to the heart of the matter of the history of the place.

Main Street as most of the structures of the town’s early days still standing, and there is an impressive re-paving effort in progress. The town elders have designated this the Gordonsville Historic District and includes the properties along Main Street from the Traffic Circle to Cobb Street, as well as those along West Baker, Weaver, Market and Commerce Streets.

Apparently the trails converged here first. There was a tavern established by Nathaniel Gordon in 1794 near where the circle is today. He hosted Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Major General the Marquis de Lafayette, among other famous figures of Revolutionary times. Jefferson told southern legislators it was a “good house” for stopping over on their way to Congress, though none of them come through now.

After the Virginia Central Railroad arrived in 1840, development began around the rail depot at the other end of town. By the 1850s they were filling in the gap, which is Main Street Gordonsville today.

The junction town was the center of trade in Orange County and an economic magnet when the railroads were established as a means to get from Richmond to Alexandria, with a change of trains right there.

Gordonsville was where key supply lines funneled war supplies to Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and the Federals tried without success on several occasions to capture this town. They did come close, and got as far as the top of Bell’s Mountain, but never got any further.

I was looking for the Exchange Hotel, now a museum, but by turns a tavern, hotel, wartime hospital, Freedman’s Bureau and hotel again before falling derelict in the Great Depression. The building escaped demolition through the good works of the City Council in the 1970s, and stands now fully restored, just a hundred yards from the tracks it served as an inn.

As a Civil War Receiving Hospital, The Exchange received over 70,000 men as patients. I pared the Panzer by the tracks, and walked around the grounds toward the gift shop on the ground floor and talked to Grace, an attractive young woman who was the sole official presence in the place.

It is ten bucks to tour the museum, well worth it, and I had the one question she was probably expecting: “So, with all those soldiers who died here, is the place haunted?”

She nodded matter-of-factly. “Sure.” She didn’t seem surprised, nor embarrassed that he admitted the supernatural aspect of the place. “I know for a fact. I have been here when there was no one else in the building and have heard footsteps upstairs. Other people have seen shadows that looked like people, and we have motion detectors that go off all the time.”

“Could be the building settling,” I said and she smiled.

“Sure.”

I gave her my ten spot and wandered through the place. On the ground floor are two large rooms devoted to the ages when the Exchange had served the C&O railroad to the left, and to the right, as the original tavern. Upstairs there were four large rooms decorated as the parlor to the old hotel, and what the rooms might have looked like to a gentleman traveler and across the hall, the quarters of a proper lady of the day.

On the third story was the War on one side, the Stars and Bars on a stanchion leaning across the wall. The 13th Virginia Infantry (“The Lucky 13th!) was raised in these parts, and the Museum is loyal to the local boys. In the front is one room decorated wit hard iron cots as it might have been when the Exchange was the center of a vast field of white tents filled with the wounded. And across the hall is a suite decorated as the Freedman’s Bureau that had provided services to fifty former slaves freed by Emancipation.

All-in-all, it is a wonderful museum with a local feel, and the very real and palpable sense that the society in which it was built is as alien as the moon. The original cook-house still stands across the courtyard, and slaves carrying food to the tavern where instructed to whistle as they walked, so their owner could be confident that they were not eating profits on the journey across the yard.

Sobering.

Anyway, that reminded me that I was getting hungry and I walked back through the gift shop and asked Grace if she could direct me to the Exchange BBQ. She took me to the window and pointed out a white building with a green roof about a hundred yards away on the other side of the tracks.

“You can leave your car here,” she said. “It is worth the visit. The Hartmans opened the place almost forty years ago, and it is a landmark.”

I thanked her for the courtesy, and walked down to the tracks and around the back of the restaurant. People were dining on the porch in the pleasant afternoon sunshine. I walked up the stairs, entered the dining area and realized there are no wait staff. You just queue up and place your order at one end of the long serving bar as you watch your meal being prepared.

I opted for the pulled-pork sandwich and got a pound of the chopped brisket with corn bread to go. The tables are paper-covered and a box with six BBQ sauces- one fiery, one mustardy, another with a Vinegar North Carolina edge to it. The bun was moist, so was the pork, and I thought if they had bar service this would be a splendid place to sit on the porch and contemplate the vagaries of history.

Right on queue, a whistle blew, and a CSX freight train came across the grade, signaling with the distinctive sound that has marked this junction for nearly two hundred years. Five engines hauling more than a hundred cars, laboring around the turn as it passed the Museum.

I took my take-away bag back to the car and drove out of town slowly, looking at the empty store-fronts and the classic brick architecture that had stoically witnessed the passing of the trains since before the War that will forever define this place.

Want a decent sandwich or a rack of ribs, or maybe a combo plate with your history?

Gordonsville is your place.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicscocotra.com