Culpeper Motor Corp: five decades and counting

When M.E. Rudy first opened Culpeper Motor Corporation 52 years ago, the large majority of his business - 90 percent to be exact - came from farmers.

Today, more than five decades later, agricultural business accounts for 10 percent of the business done at Culpeper Motor, a lawn and garden tractor dealership on Bus. 29.

Rudy, 81, moved from Warrenton to his home near the Culpeper Country Club - where he served as club president in 1971 and is the club’s oldest living president - in 1956, the year he opened Culpeper Motor Corporation.

Since then, the World War II vet has learned to adjust to the times. In fact, Rudy had to do some evolving from the very beginning.
He first opened Culpeper Motor on South East Street in the building that today houses Brown Harris Investments.
But just two years later, Rudy said, they had to move.

“The town said all the implement dealers had to get out of town,” he said. “About that time, we planned to build this building,” Rudy said of his second and final business location at 401 James Madison Highway.

The year was 1958, when the town’s limits stopped at the Mountain Run Bridge on North Main Street.

“When we moved out here we started selling chainsaws and things like that and the town said we had to stop doing that, we made too much racket,” Rudy recalled. “The next thing I knew, we were in town,” he said of the 1968 boundary line adjustment that expanded the town’s borders along Bus. 29 to where Wal-Mart sits today.

In 1971, Rudy said, he served on the citizen’s committee that helped with planning for the construction of Mountain Run Lake and Lake Pelham, both located not far from his house off of the country club golf course.

“That’s why Culpeper has grown so much - because of this water,” Rudy said.

Through the years, his business changed equipment franchises and endured strikes in the industry. After taking on a GMC truck contract and later adding Pontiac, Rudy said he was confronted with the news in the late 1980s that Culpeper could only have one dealer for the GM line.
And it wasn’t him.

Eventually, Rudy said, they sold all the GM contracts back to the American company and expanded into Cub Cadet and Yanmar, equipment that the shop sells today.

Business in 2008 is “pretty good,” Rudy said, especially since the shop underwent a remodeling and got a new paint job earlier this year. The rim around the roof used to be blue; now it’s a bright orange for Cub Cadet.

“We put a new roof on the building - that cost an arm and a leg - and we got a lot of other things that we’re going to do,” said Rudy, who employs nine.