Politics and law on West Davis Street

This is the first story in an occasional series highlighting the people and places that embody Culpeper, in recognition of the town’s 250th anniversary.

Law and government converge on historic West Davis Street, a center of order through the ages.

Well, mostly.

Included on the original plat when the town was laid out in 1759, West Davis emerged as the center of legal practice in Culpeper; a strip of offices on the street’s north side used to be known as “Lawyer’s Row.”

By the 1870s, Culpeper County government moved in, erecting a third courthouse at the end of West Davis Street. Builder Sam Proctor handled the $18,700 construction project and his handiwork still stands today.

Here’s an interesting bit from the Culpeper Historical Society: notice the pretty cupola topping the courthouse? Its eight arched windows used to be covered with louvers, or wooden slats.
Interestingly, they were removed during World War II when the cupola was used as a lookout station for enemy planes, according to “Historic Culpeper.”

By 1883, John F. Rixey, attorney at law, advertised in the Culpeper Times that he had an office on Davis Street, “near the courthouse.”

Lawyers still practice in the West Davis Street area today, including John J. “Butch” Davies III, former state delegate and native son of Culpeper. His office is one street over on West Cameron. And in fact, Davies came up in the area.

“As a courthouse kid, I was there after school,” he said, mentioning his Uncle Pete Davies, then commissioner of the revenue, whose office was in the courthouse. He was elected to the post in 1939, according to a news report from the time.

“I would go to the courthouse after school and clean windows with newspaper and ammonia water to earn money to go to the movies on Saturday,” Butch said.

Former clerk of the court, Dot Faulconer, was his “Sugar Lump,” he added, because, “She would feed me lumps of sugar in the clerk’s office.”

Many years earlier in 1908, Culpeper County built the jail at 132 W. Davis, which today houses the sheriff’s office. But of course history preceded the jail.

During the winter occupation of 1863-64, General U.S. Grant is said to have established his first headquarters in a house on the very site where the jail was built. The house got torn down to do so.

Culpeper’s early jailors kept their family close, according to the Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office web site. “The jailor and his family lived at the jail and his wife’s primary function was to cook for the inmates.”

But some of the early stories that came out of that jail would turn one’s stomach.

Take Henry C. Wheatley of Elkwood, for example, who hung himself there, as reported by The Culpeper Exponent March 26, 1909: “Demented man hangs himself in county jail.” Even more grisly, the week before, Wheatley was placed in jail on charges that he killed his wife by chopping her head off with an ax.

An equally gruesome scene started at the old jail in November of 1918. That’s when, just a few days before Thanksgiving, an unnamed mob of men wearing hoods snatched 18-year-old prisoner Allie Thompson — a black farmer from northern Culpeper — from the brick building.

Rope around his neck, Thompson was dragged three miles up Rixeyville Road (Route 229) and hung from a tree. In the jail on charges that he raped a white woman, Thompson never had his day in the courthouse next door and no one was ever arrested for his lynching. A three-part investigative series in the Star-Exponent from 2004 uncovered that key facts in the Thompson case were seriously misrepresented. So much for due process.

But get this: things were really quiet in the West Davis Street jail by the next year. On June 6, 1919, jailer O.M. Tipton reported it had no prisoners. No other details reported.

The same year, C.B. Mitchell was appointed janitor for the entire courthouse at a monthly salary of $35, The Virginia Star reported. His duties also included firing the courthouse furnace, jail furnace and taking care of the lawn.

The January 1929 Virginia Star reported county supervisors met “in their office in the courthouse” with clerk C.T. Guinn presiding. Two years earlier, the town erected a town hall at 118 W. Davis, next to the old jail.

E.A. Walter, a well-known local architect of the time, designed the town hall building, which originally housed a fire department, town offices, library and banquet hall.

In 1939, the town, county and chamber of commerce met there for a report on the town. Frank Smith was mayor and the town’s budget was $116,000.

At the meeting, Town Manager Victor von Gemmingen reported the following “pressing needs” of the town — a new engine at the power plant, inadequate reservoir, trash burning at the town dump as a menace to residents of the north end, annexation and no playground.

Town Hall was renovated in 1960 when the new fire hall of Company 1 went up near the corner of West Davis and West streets, former site of Culpeper Methodist Church.

Town Hall moved from West Davis Street in January 2004 to the current municipal meeting on South Main Street. And yet, old Town Hall still stands on West Davis 82 years after its construction. Today, it houses county government, including the commonwealth’s attorney office.

Culpeper Town Councilman Bobby Ryan lives in the area in a home facing West Davis and all the courthouse action. Ryan has lived there for two decades in a house built circa 1920s by his great-grandfather, Charles Hitt.

Hitt is the same guy who built the Lord Culpeper Hotel on Main Street and the art deco Medical Arts Building on West Locust.

According to Ryan, Hitt served on Town Council in the 1910s, but that’s another story for another time. Asked why Culpeper Town has lasted so long, Ryan got a serious look on his face, responding, “Because you’ve got natives that give a damn.”