Remington, VA

At the 2020 census, Remington was a Fauquier County town of 626 people near the Rappahannock River and the Culpeper County line. Its first life was tied to a mill and a proposed canal; its second began when the Orange and Alexandria Railroad reached town in the early 1850s. The place was once called Rappahannock Station, and its location made it a road, rail, river, and battlefield crossroads.

Civil War fighting came right up to the town. Brandy Station, the largest cavalry battle of the war, spread across the surrounding countryside in June 1863, and Remington also sat near the First and Second Battles of Rappahannock Station. Fires in 1895, 1919, and 1925 destroyed commercial buildings, but the town's historic district still holds late-19th and early-20th-century homes, stores, churches, and institutional buildings. The old route remains legible. It still reads on arrival. Remington is a small town with a river on one side and a lot of history pressing in from every direction.