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Old Culpeper, New Rules

Although Northern Virginians have flooded into Culpeper, Steve Jenkins, stopping by Baby Jim's Snack Bar, is more concerned about illegal immigrants.
Although Northern Virginians have flooded into Culpeper, Steve Jenkins, stopping by Baby Jim's Snack Bar, is more concerned about illegal immigrants. (Dayna Smith - Dayna Smith -- The Washington Post)
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But with all the people from the Washington area moving in, and all that money sloshing around the countryside, Culpeper is attracting Target and Kohl's and Lowe's. As soon as you leave the town center, you hit huge expanses of dirt where big boxes are about to rise. "I don't know if we really need all that," Thomas says. "How deep into Virginia are you going to have to go to find a town like this?"

Despite her misgivings about growth, Thomas sees an upside. "Better schools, better roads, a new theater coming in with the kind of entertainment they never had here," she says. "It all comes from having more people and a bigger tax base."

That's where she and Jenkins part ways. He sees nothing good about bigger. There's a drive-up espresso booth in the parking lot of the shopping center now, but Jenkins prefers to buy his java at 7-Eleven. Those chi-chi shops downtown are awfully pretty, but he'd rather eat at Baby Jim's Snack Bar, where burgers are a buck even.

Jenkins realizes that the moneyed arrivals from the north are not going anywhere. But maybe, he says, just maybe, something can be done about those from the south. "It's a much easier issue, because it's black and white," he says. "I don't get it when people say immigration is a gray issue. You're either legal, or you're not. We need to help them be legal. I'm not for anything harsh. If they're willing to come forward and go through a process, we have an obligation to assist them in every way. But I'm about rules."

Somehow, his town turned from a place that respected rules to one where people don't even know what the rules are. This eats at Jenkins. The solution, he says, is "easy, simple." Just set the rules and let the immigrants become Americans, and then we can all live by the same rules.

That's how it always was in Culpeper; that's how it still is at Baby Jim's, where they make a great milkshake and where big signs instruct customers in exactly what the rules are: "No Loud Talking, No Foul Language, No Loafing and No Sitting on Top of Tables."

E-mail:marcfisher@washpost.com


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