Shepherdstown

Last weekend, Peter and I decided we wanted a break from city life and decided to drive a couple of hours away to Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Neither of us had ever been to West Virginia before, and I was intrigued to check out small town life. Shepherdstown has a population of only 1,700 people (though there is a university there and when in session, the 4,200 students more than triple the population). It's tiny--we walked around the entire town in one afternoon--so I'm guessing when students arrive it probably feels overcrowded quickly. In fact, we ate lunch at a restaurant that was very busy--it took over an hour to get our food--so I don't know what even happens during the school year. But anyway, there were lots of cute things to photograph, and I took about a million pictures for your viewing pleasure. :)

Here is the tiny public library. It was closed, so we couldn't go inside. I love that little tree out front.

Peter guessed that this building may have been a fire station at one point because of all the garage doors, but I'm not sure what it's used for now. It's pretty though; I love the large windows.

There's a little stream that runs through town that you keep seeing, and crossing over, as you walk around.

The "Little House" is the cutest thing I've ever seen; I think I squealed when I saw it. It was built in 1929 by the college as a teacher training project, supposedly so they could observe children playing, a.k.a. "lab brats," which made me laugh. It's only 10 feet high by 9 1/2 feet wide. It has five rooms and two stories--there were little tiny stairs going up the back of the house. I so wish we could have gone inside, but it wasn't open, so we just peeked in the windows. I decided I will absolutely build a real-life dollhouse just like this when I'm rich whether I have kids or not.

German Street is lined with lots of little shops selling antiques, jewelry, some handmade things...all sorts of stuff really.

The Opera House shows indie movies and has live music. I'd never heard of any of the bands on the upcoming schedule, so I looked a few of them up later. Most of them seemed to be bluegrass/folksy type bands (and more than one listed the Grateful Dead as their main inspiration), so I don't really think it's my type of music but probably typical for a college town.

We passed by lots of cute houses with dogs and cats napping on porches and also saw some roosters and chickens in backyards.

At the end of our visit, we walked up to Rumsey Monument, which is on a hill at the edge of town to see views of the Potomac River. I imagine it's probably very pretty in autumn when the leaves change.

I definitely had romantic notions about small town life that were pretty much dispelled on this trip. I thought that small towns and less people would mean it wouldn't feel crowded, but that wasn't true at the restaurant for sure. And I also naively thought that people would be really friendly and neighborly to each other, but we didn't see people in the town chatting or even acknowledging each other when they passed on the street. We even saw a car honk and sort of road rage, which surprised me. I thought people moved to a small town to get away from that.

So I guess people are still people no matter where they live. And I also realize you can't judge an entire town from just a few hours spent walking around. The few people we interacted with were really nice. I was standing on one lady's front step to get a photo of a building across the street when she came home. We apologized for blocking her door and loitering-lol-and she was like "no no, take as many pictures as you want" and was really sweet about it.

Anyway, I definitely recommend a weekend visit to Shepherdstown if you're in the area. I think most people are more likely to visit nearby Harpers's Ferry (where there's lots of outdoorsy things to do like river rafting and zip lining) or Charles Town (where there's a casino and horse racing), but Shepherdstown is super cute.

One more thing: the directions we got from Mapquest were to take VA 267 to get there, which I would not recommend. Lots of traffic and two tolls (about $8 in nonpeak times) meant it took twice as long to get there as it was supposed to take. We also got turned around a couple of times on country roads once we were in West Virginia due to Mapquest's confusing directions. We finally just looked at a map on my phone and found an alternate route to get there once we were close. On the way back, we took Leesburg Pike the whole way. It took a little less time and was much more scenic...lots of farms and cows and horses to see and way less traffic.

Now that we've seen one small town, I'm anxious to visit others and compare. We'd been wanting to take some weekend road trips this summer anyway, and now I think we'll definitely try to find some cute smaller towns to visit along the way. If anyone has any suggestions for towns within driving distance of DC for a weekend getaway, please share in the comments! xo, Mary