Jesse Foster

To celebrate the achievements and extraordinary resilience of the historic class of 2021, the Rappahannock News will feature one Rappahannock County High School senior each week until graduation on May 28. Students have been nominated by their teachers and mentors to be featured in the Senior Spotlight series.

When Jesse Foster was nine years old, he started collecting scrap metal.

“People would bring me junk stu and I would just pull it apart [and] try to put it back together,” he said. “Eventually I was able to put it back together.”

Since then, Foster has learned how to x all kinds of things: weed eaters, farm equipment, and lawn mowers — one of which he souped up into a “racing” mower that topped out at a speed of 45 mph. “I did a pulley swap system,” he said. “So on the motor I put a bigger pulley. That way it had more rotations on the motor. And on the back I put a smaller pulley to get more rotations on the gearbox. … It was actually a pretty neat experience.”

But the mower ended up in scrap, Foster notes, because it was too dangerous to ride.

Foster, known to his friends as Big Red, will graduate in two weeks from Rappahannock County High School. In the fall, he will head to Lincoln College of Technology in Nashville, Tenn. to get an associates degree as a heavy equipment mechanic.

“I don’t want a job where every day I do the same thing,” he said. “I gotta have something where every day is something di erent — diagnose a new problem or do something simple, fresh tires, oil change, stu like that.

But I also want to be able to turn to something that’s complicated and be able to put it back together and just say I did something di erent.”

Foster has grown up with deep roots in Rappahannock. His father is a farmer in the county and his grandparents used to run the Hillsdale Country Store on Route 211. The family traces its history in the county back to before the establishment of the Shenandoah National Park forced them to leave the nearby mountains.

“I want to do something nobody else in my family has done yet, and that’s go to college,” Foster said. “Nobody in my family has done that or trade school, so I want to be one of the rst. I want to show [them] that I can do it.”

Foster says his dream is to work for Mopar, the parts and services division of Chrysler, or Cummins, a diesel engine manufacturer. The two companies have in common that they manufacture parts for Dodge.

“I’ve always been a Dodge fan,” Foster said. “I’ve done all the research on Dodge since they were a bicycle company.”

He even talks about his 1997 Dodge truck as if it were a member of his family. “I think of it like me,” he said. “It’s all beefy, it’s kind of fat, but overall, just a big, hard working truck. It’s ready to roll. It does everything I need it to do. I would do anything for anybody and that truck would do anything for me. I love that truck. Just something about it.”

Foster is no stranger to hard work. Even now, when he’s not at school he’s working at Adams Property Solutions or at Adams Custom Slaughter or as a self- employed lawn mower repairman.

“I have a hard time sitting, I have a hard time doing nothing. I just enjoy to have projects,” he says. But if he could give his younger self a piece of advice, he says he wishes he had pushed himself even harder.

“I wish I would have pushed myself harder just to see what else I could have accomplished — especially in school,” he said.

But Foster is pushing himself now. “I'm pushing myself as hard as possible trying to get as many scholarships [ as I can] because I don't have the most money. But [ I’m] trying to make sure my scholarships are done to make sure I can pay for school.”