By Rob Hedelt
The year was 2005 and Westmoreland County native and resident Chip Jones was working for his brother’s trash business, a job that had him traveling the length and breadth of the Northern Neck.
The young man, raised on his family’s grain and vegetable farm in Montross, appreciated the fields, woods and open spaces he’d pass on his journeys. But one thing he noticed really got under his skin: only seeing specialized license plates touting the Eastern Shore.
Jones, who served as farm manager at Stratford Hall from 2013 to 2019 and as Westmoreland’s elected board member for the Northern Neck Soil and Water Conservation District from 2011 to 2019, started to ask questions.
“Why weren’t there any Northern Neck plates? I started thinking that the Northern Neck needed to get one too,” said Jones, who now lives in Midlothian and now works as the equal employment manager for the Virginia National Guard. “I started looking in to how to get a plate for the region that was home to me.”
With help from many, the effort finally succeeded in 2009.
Since then, the specialized plate has delivered annual income –$15 per plate– that constitutes important funding for the Northern Neck Land Conservancy. The Land Conservancy is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the rural heritage, lands, water and culture of Virginia’s Northern Neck and Essex County. The organization works with landowners to conserve open spaces, forests, farms and wildlife habitats.
Back when the effort to get a Northern Neck plate was getting started, Jones and others had to research what it took to create a new tag. They learned that in addition to lining up 300 people ready to buy a specialized plate, organizers of the effort needed to pick a group to benefit financially from it.
“At that time, I was starting to hear and see newspaper stories about the Northern Neck Land Conservancy,” said Jones, and it seemed like a good fit for the license tag.
Jones noted that one story focused on someone interested in developing land on Nomini Creek in Westmoreland County. The article compared the Northern Neck to Northern Virginia: a place that possessed large tracts of natural, undeveloped lands that was facing development pressures from all sides as time went by.
The lifelong environmentalist who eventually served as board member for the Northern Neck Land Conservancy from 2010 to 2013 said he’s always believed in one of the Land Conservancy’s main goals: preserving open spaces in the Northern Neck. And it appealed to him that the Land Conservancy “encompasses all five counties of the Northern Neck,” so that the license plate project “would singularly benefit the Northern Neck in that way.” (In later years, Northern Neck Land Conservancy later added Essex County to the area it serves, at the request of residents there.)
Jones got help in the “create a plate” campaign from many different quarters: state legislators Rob Wittman, Ed Scott, Richard Stuart and Albert Pollard, as well as members and officials of the Land Conservancy, especially Mary Louisa Pollard and early director Jamie Tucker, and from Susan McFadden at Open Door Communications.
“My initial idea was to have something on the tag that incorporated both waters and fields,” said Jones, but the tractor he had in mind went by the wayside. “The design we came up is the one featuring a deadrise (boat) and people have been really happy with it. I see them all over the Richmond area and around the state.”
He said it helped that a campaign was started with local businesses, groups and individuals promoting the idea of the Northern Neck getting its own plate.
The still-active National Guard member, now a master sergeant, noted that his deployments to Iraq and elsewhere made for some interesting challenges to stay in touch as the drive for a Northern Neck plate progressed.
Jones said at one point, he printed a mock-up of the suggested plate and attached it to the one vehicle his unit had for a photo-op in Baghdad.
When he was training at Fort Pickett, Jones got a special leave approved to come to the Conservancy’s annual Boots and Barbeque event at King Copsico Farm “in uniform to promote the license plate.”
“When the effort succeeded, actually getting 400 people signed up, we saw plates first coming back to the Neck in 2009 and 2010,” he said, noting that some of his relatives were among the first to get a plate. “I was able to get NNK VA before the plate was approved, and transferred it over once the Northern Neck plate was available.”
Jones noted that Jamie Tucker was really “the engine that moved it all along. She was a real go-getter. When I was recognized with a Conservationist of the Year award, I made sure she was present. Even though the plate was my idea, she was the one who made it happen. I don’t know that I had the organizational skills at that time, or the time and energy to get this done.”
The Virginia Tech grad, who got a degree in agriculture and applied economics, noted that while getting his initial college credits at Rappahannock Community College he operated a water quality study on Cat Point Creek that gave him a feel of how the health of our water is directly tied to uses of the land.
And working in the family’s trash business, traveling all the Northern Neck routes, Jones said he’d “gotten an appreciation for environmental awareness. . . seeing the amount of stuff people were throwing away.”
Jones, who grew up with tomato plants in the family’s fields, noted that his father, William ‘Billy’ Jones, and mother, Christine Jones, worked for the Westmoreland County School system. “Between my mom and dad, I grew up with a love of the land and love of learning.”
All of this makes Jones the perfect person to create a signature license plate that gives drivers a chance to tout their love of the region, while helping protect it for future generations.
You can get your own Northern Neck license plate through your local DMV or on their website at https://www.dmv.virginia.gov/vehicles/license-plates/search/northern-neck
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