Saturday, August 11, 2007

Nancy Drew and The Secret of the Edinburg Water Tower

It is bigger than Edinburg. No, I don't mean the Edinburg water tower, although that structure is higher than Edinburg, but, as small as Edinburg is, it is still magnitudes larger than its water tower. But I digress. What is bigger than Edinburg is ... there are three decorated towers along I-81!

Coming from the north, the first is Woodstock, the second Edinburg, and the last Mt. Jackson.


While there really is no place to get a photo of the Edinburg water tower without the trees obsuring the base (and I really searched), I did manage to get close enough to capture the spirit of the thing. Actually, it's probably better that the base is below the treeline -- it makes the tower appear to float as a real hot air balloon would.

Woodstock has a nicely painted tower, but no particular picture. Mt. Jackson, however, has decorated their tower with very realistic apples.


I did don my Nancy Drew Girl Detective Hat and found out that Edinburg's Mayor was the first to paint the town water tower.

Congratulations, Edinburg, on a fine water tower, and I now know why they are so proud of it. Now if I could just find the "new school"!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Zo, My in-laws live in Woodstock and consider the watertowers their pride and joy of living in the Shenandoah Valley. The story behind them is really quite simple. Some rich guy drove his son from No Virginia to one of the colleges down 81 on a regular basis. He would see these monstrosities each time and thought something should be done to them, not only to mark the town, but give something pleasing to the eye. Since he was rich, he had the bucks to persuade the towns to allow the towns to design the water towers and he paid the bill!
So now this guy goes up and down 81 and has something pleasant to look at and he knows where he is at.
And that is the rest of the story!
Nancy