Reaguer building: old funeral home no longer stands

This old building no longer stands at the corner of South Main and Culpeper streets, but it shows up on the March, 1886 Sanborn Insurance Map - the earliest map of its kind commissioned in Culpeper.

Notice Antioch Baptist Church at the back along West Street and the old cars.

Today, a parking lot adjacent to Village Frameworks & Gallery occupies the site. The house was torn down in the 1960s.

But there was a building at that very corner as early as 1835, according to the Thompson Map from that year; its owner was Oswald Flint.

Whether or not it was the same building that shows up in the later Sanborn Map is unknown.

The 1886 map lists the building’s use as, “boarding house,” remaining so through 1896, at which time it’s a “dwelling.”

By the October 1931 Sanborn Map, the house was a funeral home and a large rear addition had been installed.

The late George Beard Jr., in his booklet “A Personal History of Culpeper,” remembered it as the W.H. Reaguer Funeral Home.

“Mr. Will Reaguer always stood out front on the top step speaking to folks passing by,” wrote Beard, a longtime Culpeper banker and former state delegate. “I guess he and Bowman Clark knew all the walking folks in Culpeper as the town’s population was quite low at that time.”

By the 1958 Sanborn Map, this building served several uses and before its demolition was the “Green Thumb Xmas Corner,” according to another old
picture.

Skip and Lou Price, the husband-wife team that owns Village Frameworks, moved their business to that location in 1999 after nine years in the Meadowbrook Shopping Center.

Lou, who grew up in Culpeper, said she does not remember the old funeral home building. She would have only been about 6 when it was torn down in the early 1960s.

“It was a parking lot when we first built and then they built the theater,” added Skip of the Regal Four Theater next door. -Allison Brophy Champion