At the turn of the 20th century, the main highways on the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula were navigable rivers and creeks that ran between the shores.
By that time, good roads allowing automobiles and trucks to become a main means of transportation were three decades away. For those living on the Rappahannock River near Center Cross in Essex County, it was more convenient to motor across three miles of river to Wellford Wharf to buy ice or go to the village of Sharps to buy gasoline than to drive a car to Tappahannock on poorly maintained dirt roads, 12 miles overland.
In a 2000 interview with the late Whitt Garrett, he talked about growing up near Bowler’s (steamboat) Wharf in Essex and trips across the river with his father to Wellford Wharf and Sharps on the Northern Neck.
“When I was a child my father [Frank] would go in a motor-powered log canoe to Wellford Wharf to get ice from an ice plant,” said Whitt. “We would tow a skiff to carry the blocks of ice from the plant.
“Wellford Wharf was the closest ice plant to us,” he said. “At home, we had a large icebox (no electricity) and needed ice to keep our food refrigerated.
“Our wooden icebox was located outside on the ground and was insulated with tar paper wrapped around the outside and inside,” he recalls. “You see we didn’t get current (electricity) at home until 1932.
“We’d put blocks of ice inside the icebox and cover the ice with sawdust to keep it from melting fast and even in August it would last maybe 10 days to two weeks and then we’d go back to Wellford and get more ice.
“Sharps is right across the river and when I was real little my father went to Sharps to do business more than to Tappahannock because the roads were so bad,” said Whitt.
“There was a couple big general merchandise stores, a bank and an oil distributing company there,” he said. “I loved to go to Sharps. Daddy would take six or eight five-gallon gasoline cans in the boat and fill them up. Then we would go over to Mr. [William Garnett] “Guy” Acree’s [general merchandise] store and Daddy would buy me a pound of ginger snaps [cookies] and as we motored across the river he and I would eat every one.
“Later Daddy become a stock holder in Southside Bank in Tappahannock, but early on he did all his banking at Rappahannock State Bank [founded in 1908] at Sharps,” said Whitt. “The bank folded along with a lot of other banks during the Great Depression.
“The same year we got electricity at our house in 1932, the state of Virginia took over the [secondary] roads [under the Byrd Road Act] and the roads got a lot better,” he said. “As bad as the Depression was, many changes that came from it made life better for us.”
It happened right here in Rivah country!
