Identifying Oak Shade’s Long Lost Buildings
When we first moved into our old house in 1985 one of the first things we did was gut the Kitchen. The sink was an old glazed cast iron one that when we removed it we found it was shimmed up by an old aluminum store token from J.M. Weaver’s in Rixeyville. A few years later a friend and his wife stopped by and we were showing them all the neat stuff we had been finding around the house and when his wife saw the token she claimed the store was owned by one of their ancestors so I gave it up. I suspect it ended up on eBay as item number 325828154683. Either way, Weaver’s store was in the building currently occupied by the Rixeyville Post Office.
As the volunteer Archivist for Little Fork Episcopal Church in Rixeyville I have been scanning and cataloging all the Church records back to 1730 and came across an article in the Virginia Star, Volume 13, Number 36, 25 February 1932 Page 1 which confused the #@! out of me. The picture is clearly of the monument to the Little Fork Rangers 4th Virginia Cavalry Company D and was taken in 1904 but it was not the traditional picture we have seen of the Rangers when the monument was unveiled. The caption says “The above photograph of the Culpeper Minute Men of twenty- eight years ago”. These were the 13th Virginia Infantry Company B from Summer 1861 - Spring 1865. Now the interesting part of the story. The last paragraph in the caption speaks of the old house just in back of the men some distance away and across the public road was used for many years as a country store.
J. M. Weaver announced he was selling all his goods at cost in January of 1899. A note in the article below says “His customers seem numerous, from the number of horses seen tied at his store every day. By that October he was announcing the opening of his new store in Rixeyville. Route 229 today was not there between Little Fork Church Road and Oak Shade Road. Construction did not begin until 1926 and Rixey Ford had to be used to cross the Hazel River. After the new road was built the town of Oak Shade dwindled. Looks like Weaver made a good decision.