Winchester Tales

06/19/2026

A young Richard E. Byrd stands at a second-story window of his family’s home at 326 Amherst Street and looks to the horizon. Across the street, on the hill, is the old Wi******er Academy, where he attends school. Byrd is looking for something new and exciting. He enjoys spending time around the Rouss Fire Company and often rides along on the fire apparatus when he gets the chance. Like many boys, he dreams about adventure, though he has no idea where those dreams will eventually lead.

After graduating from the United States Naval Academy in 1912, Byrd became one of the most famous explorers in American history. He helped pioneer aviation, flew in the Arctic, led expeditions to Antarctica, and became the first person to fly over the South Pole. His name became known around the world, but it all started here in Wi******er. A boy standing at a window on Amherst Street dreamed of seeing what was beyond the horizon, and then spent the rest of his life finding out. Although the house no longer stands, Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s legacy lives on…

06/19/2026

A few days ago, I noticed a couple standing quietly in front of the old Lutheran Church interpretive sign at Mount Hebron Cemetery. They had traveled all the way from Oregon, and there they stood, reading every word and studying the image. Watching them made me smile. Years ago, while watching a documentary about Pompeii, I became fascinated with the way archaeological sites used modern interpretive signs to help visitors visualize what once stood before them. A little research into Roman ruins revealed the same idea—using technology and thoughtful design to bridge the gap between the present and the past. I remember thinking, why can’t we do that here?

That simple idea eventually became a reality thanks to a remarkable team effort. Kyle Hopkins of Four Square Architects helped bring the vision to life, Bryan Quick and the talented folks at Fast Signs transformed concepts into something visitors could actually experience, and Jim Coots and his wonderful team at Mount Hebron cut back limbs and created a clear eye line. Together, we created something that allows history to speak a little more clearly to those who come searching for it. Seeing visitors from the opposite side of the country stop, read, learn, and connect with Wi******er’s past reminded me why projects like this matter. If you haven’t visited Mount Hebron lately, take a walk through the cemetery and see this interpretive display for yourself. It’s a wonderful example of how modern technology can be used to tell old stories in a new way.

06/18/2026

For the past two months, I've been searching for a woman named Susan Truby.

It all started with an old postcard I saw on EBay. The card showed Washington's Headquarters and was written by a nine-year-old girl named Susan and mailed to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in April of 1968. Armed with only a name, I made countless phone calls, left voicemails, and followed every lead I could find. Then tonight, my phone rang. On the other end was the real Susan Truby, now sixty-seven years old.

As we talked, the memories came rushing back. Susan told me she had traveled east with her mother for a school convention scheduled in Washington, D.C., on April 5, 1968. The day before, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the convention was canceled as Washington came to a standstill. Since Susan's mother had been born in Wi******er, they decided to spend their unexpected free time here. During their visit, they stopped at Washington's Headquarters, where nine-year-old Susan purchased a postcard and mailed it home to her father, Frank Truby, in Albuquerque.

Frank kept the postcard until his passing in 2014. His belongings were eventually sold through an estate sale, and somehow that little card found its way onto eBay. After speaking with Susan and hearing the story firsthand, I immediately purchased the postcard with one goal in mind—to send it home.

When I told Susan what I planned to do, she was absolutely thrilled. Then she shared something that gave me chills. She still lives in the very same house where the postcard was delivered in 1968. And standing out front is the very same mailbox.

In a few days, that postcard will once again leave Wi******er bound for Albuquerque, traveling the same route it traveled nearly fifty-eight years ago. Only this time it won't be arriving in the hands of her father. It will arrive in the hands of the little girl who wrote it.

I just found this postcard on eBay. At first glance, nothing stood out. But something about this short note to a young girl's dad made me take a closer look. I’m glad I did.

On a rainy afternoon in 1968, a young girl named Susan Truby stood with her mother on Cork Street in front of George Washington's Headquarters. She picked up a small rock and kept it. Later, she wrote to her father in New Mexico: “I saw this in real life. I got a rock and we have had some rain.” Her father, Frank K Truby, was working at Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico...supporting the Apollo 8 mission. His role focused on system integration and safety—bringing together sensors, control electronics, and testing to ensure systems would perform under extreme conditions. Apollo 8 became a turning point, sending the first crew to orbit the Moon and return safely, with critical systems performing at an extraordinary level of reliability, approaching a 99.9 percent success rate. Engineers like Frank Truby helped make that possible. While his daughter wrote about a quiet stop in Wi******er in 1968, he was part of the effort that carried a crew around the Moon and back home.

06/17/2026

On a cold night in 1754, a tired young Colonel named George Washington pushed open the door of Henry Heth’s Tavern in Wi******er…looking for a warm meal and a place to sleep. He had spent several days traveling the frontier, often sleeping on hay, straw, and dirt floors. The tavern was full, but the keeper offered Washington a shared bed for sixpence. He gladly accepted. Years later, Washington would write of sleeping “with man, wife, and children, like dogs and cats,” and being thankful for any spot facing the fire.

Heth’s Tavern stood along Braddock Street near the site of today’s Braddock Street United Methodist Church, just across from the parade grounds where Washington drilled his soldiers during the French & Indian War. Wi******er was still a young frontier town, but it had already become an important stop in the life of a man who would shape a nation. The next time you pass this spot, remember that before George Washington became a legend, he was simply a cold, exhausted officer looking for a warm place to sleep.

06/17/2026

Before he became a country music legend, before the sold-out arenas, the marriages, the headlines, and the demons that would follow him for the rest of his life, George Jones was just a young singer sitting in the passenger seat of a car on a rainy April afternoon in 1964. He had just finished performing at Watermelon Park and was catching a ride to Dulles Airport with Catherine Strosnider of Stephens City. As the rain streaked across the windshield and Route 7 rolled beneath them, the two talked the entire way. Somewhere between Wi******er and the airport, a friendship was born. Jones told Catherine that if he ever found himself back in the Shenandoah Valley, he would look her up. Unlike so many promises made in passing, he kept this one. In the years that followed, “The Possum” became a regular visitor at the Strosnider home on White Oak Road, where music filled the porch late into the night and laughter echoed across the countryside. One evening, after a little too much celebrating, a band member mistook the darkness below the porch for a swimming pool and dove headfirst into thin air. The entire group piled into Catherine’s car and rushed to Wi******er Memorial Hospital, where the noise and commotion finally prompted a nurse to demand silence. George, never one to back down from a moment, grinned and reportedly replied, “I’ll buy this hospital.”

A few years later, in 1967, George visited Wi******er’s ABC store on Loudoun Street looking for his favorite bourbon. To most folks he was just another customer, but Catherine drove him there and snapped a photograph as he exited. It’s an ordinary picture, yet somehow it captures something extraordinary—a country music giant standing in the middle of our little town as if he belonged here. In time, fame carried George Jones far beyond Wi******er. He married Tammy Wynette, became one of the greatest voices country music ever produced, and lived a life filled with triumph and turmoil. But for a few brief years, he found something in the northern Shenandoah Valley that money and stardom could never buy: friendship. It’s comforting to think that among all the places George Jones traveled, and all the people he met, he remembered a rainy drive from Watermelon Park and a family in Stephens City who simply treated him like anyone else.

06/17/2026

When twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant James Keith Boswell arrived in Wi******er during the winter of 1862, he quickly became one of the most important men in Stonewall Jackson’s army. A gifted engineer, Boswell served as Jackson’s Chief Engineer and helped make many of the decisions that shaped the Shenandoah Valley Campaign. It was Boswell who advised Jackson that Wi******er could not be defended against the advancing Federal army, a difficult truth that led to the town’s evacuation. While Jackson made his headquarters at Alta Vista, Boswell stayed at the Taylor Hotel, where his charm, intelligence, and easy smile made him a favorite among Wi******er’s young ladies. Yet Boswell’s heart belonged to only one woman—Sophia DeButts Carter of Fauquier County. Friends spoke often of the romance, and Boswell dreamed of the day she would become his wife.

That dream died long before he did. In early 1863, Boswell received a furlough and traveled to see Sophia, only to have his marriage proposal rejected. Heartbroken, he returned to the army determined to prove himself worthy through courage and service. Four months later, on the evening of May 2, 1863, Boswell rode beside Jackson during the famous flank attack at Chancellorsville. As darkness fell and Confederate troops mistakenly fired into their own ranks, three bullets struck the young engineer. He died instantly on the roadside, his engineering sketchbook still tucked inside his coat. The next morning, his friend Jedediah Hotchkiss found him lying peacefully beneath the trees and buried him as the Virginia moon rose overhead. Today, Boswell is remembered as one of Jackson’s brightest officers, but perhaps his story is best remembered as that of a young man who carried both duty and a broken heart into battle—and never came home.

06/17/2026

The woods above Babb’s Marsh echoed with the sound of axes and falling timber as Lewis and Joel Lupton stood on the slopes of Apple Pie Ridge and looked over the vast forests that surrounded their family home, Cherry Row. The Luptons had won the contract to supply lumber for the new railroad stretching from Harpers Ferry to Wi******er, but there was one problem—they had the trees, yet no way to mill them fast enough. Most men might have seen an obstacle. Joel Lupton saw an opportunity. Possessing only a modest Quaker education from the Hopewell Meeting House, Joel carried a remarkable gift for mechanics and invention. After reading about a new horse-powered portable sawmill in The Ohio Cultivator magazine, he purchased one and put it to work. Soon the lumber was flowing, the railroad was supplied ahead of schedule, and another challenge appeared—a four-mile plank road that needed to be graded. Joel disappeared into his workshop and emerged with a simple idea: a heavy iron blade mounted diagonally beneath a wagon. As the wagon moved forward, it scraped and leveled the earth. The device worked beautifully, and without realizing it, Joel Lupton had laid the groundwork for what would become the modern road scraper.

Inventions seemed to pour from Joel’s mind as naturally as water from a spring. On Apple Pie Ridge he devised improvements to threshing machines, created a lawn mower, developed an adding machine, improved the cotton gin, designed automatic stamping devices, and engineered a system that carried water nearly two miles from a spring to the Cherry Row house. He even constructed an ingenious weight-operated mechanism that raised and lowered windows throughout the home. Some of his ideas made fortunes for others. One man reportedly saw Joel’s scraper, patented the concept, and became wealthy, while another acquired rights connected to Joel’s mower designs and later found himself tangled in disputes involving Cyrus McCormick. None of it seemed to trouble Joel. He simply moved on to the next idea. Today, the brothers rest quietly in the Upper Ridge Friends Cemetery at the intersection of Apple Pie Ridge and Upper Ridge Roads, but their legacy remains woven into the landscape of Frederick County—a reminder that one of the Shenandoah Valley’s greatest inventors spent his life dreaming, building, and creating from a farm known as Cherry Row.

06/16/2026

I hope to see you at the Middletown 4th of July celebration!
250 years…what a great country!

06/14/2026

While metal detecting at an old colonial site outside of Wi******er, a faint signal led to a small silver object. As I sprayed it with water, it became clear that this was no ordinary find. It was a silver bodkin, crudely carved and likely fashioned locally from melted coin silver by a frontier silversmith. In colonial Virginia, silver was valuable, and a bodkin was not an inexpensive possession. It was a woman’s everyday tool, used to thread ribbons through clothing, lace stays, fasten garments, and pin hair into place. Many women carried them daily, often tucked into a cap or woven into their hair so they would always be close at hand.

This bodkin was broken but it would have had a spoon-shaped end and would have had more practical uses. It served as an ear scoop, with the collected wax often used to strengthen sewing thread. It may have had a pointed end which doubled as a toothpick. This simple tool was the colonial Swiss Army knife, helping with everything from dressing to sewing. That is why its loss is so intriguing. A silver bodkin was valuable, personal, and not easily replaced. Somewhere on this frontier homestead, a woman likely spent time searching for this very piece after it slipped from her possession. She never found it. Centuries later, my metal detector uncovered what she had lost, preserving a small but deeply personal glimpse into everyday life in the early Shenandoah Valley.

06/14/2026

The men paused for a moment as they took a break along the frozen ridge northwest of Wi******er. Then they continued digging into the hard January earth. Three times during the Civil War, this hill would play a major role in the defense of Wi******er. The site first served as artillery emplacements for Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson in 1861. In January 1863, Union General Robert H. Milroy ordered the construction of Star Fort, an imposing eight-sided earthwork whose guns commanded both the Martinsburg Turnpike and Pughtown Road. To the men digging trenches and raising embankments, it was just another day of hard labor. None could know they were helping create one of Wi******er’s most important military landmarks.

Only months later, the fort was at the center of the Second Battle of Wi******er as Confederate forces under Richard Ewell closed in on Milroy’s army. Cannon fire echoed across the valley and musket smoke drifted over the earthworks before the garrison abandoned the position under cover of darkness. The fort would again witness fighting during the Third Battle of Wi******er in September 1864 as Union troops returned and secured the city for the final time. Today, the earthworks remain remarkably visible, a silent reminder of the men who built and defended them. The Star Fort site is now owned and preserved by the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation. As you study the remarkable LiDAR image—courtesy of the LiDAR and Aerial Archaeology page—you can still trace the outlines of the old fort. It’s easy to imagine hundreds of men with pick and shovel, unknowingly shaping a piece of Wi******er’s amazing Civil War history.