"With its glass artists, antique table carvers and organically grown meats, Rappahannock County can seem more Duke of Windsor than 'Dukes of Hazzard.' But Ben Jones, who played a friendly mechanic named Cooter on the wildly popular 1980s show, has always had a special niche here.

As a television legend and former U.S. congressman, Jones brings the sort of power résumé that is appreciated in Rappahannock, where oil executives and sculptors live on gated estates overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains.

But Jones also has gained the country version of street credentials, hosting free weekend barbecue-and-bluegrass festivals at his museum-shop, Cooter's Place, where he walks around in a trucker cap and jeans opining that America learned values by watching 'The Dukes of Hazzard' and the 'heroic' regular rural folk portrayed on the show. Cooter's has drawn half a million people to this no-stoplight town since it opened in 1998.

And now that's all over.

This month, Jones plans to close what has become an international Dukes of Hazzard shrine. He and his wife, Alma Viator, will continue to live in Rappahannock, minus the business that was an apparent victim of its own success.

'I'm an actor and a writer, and I haven't done either in way too long,' Jones said. 'We're both just into a lot of things and can't give this place the time it deserves.'

After opening Cooter's, Jones was catapulted back into a limelight he hadn't known since the show ended in 1985. First came the pilgrims who park along the gravel shoulder of little Route 211 and sometimes walk as far as half a mile for an autographed T-shirt or cap.

Suddenly he was on the road every week. Sometimes it's car shows or car races, where he signs model cars and hats alongside the 'General Lee,' the orange '69 Dodge Charger that Bo and Luke Duke jumped into and out of during the show. Other weeks it's music or foliage festivals, where he performs country music with his group, Cooter's Garage Band.

Finally, it got to be too much, and the Joneses decided something had to go. Cooter's Place, they agreed, doesn't work when he isn't there -- greeting people who look at his broad warm face with a combination of awe reserved for the very famous and joy reserved for your mother when you are an infant.

Dukes mania broke out in the late 1990s, Jones said, when two things happened: 30-somethings who grew up on the show got old enough to start reminiscing about their childhoods, and cable channel TNN began re-running the show, introducing it to an entirely new generation. It was pulled in 2001, but not before the movement was underway. By then, new memorabilia -- calendars, bobble-head dolls -- were being cranked out for the first time since the original show ended. Ebay offers hundreds of Dukes items for sale, ranging from a $20 dinner tray to a General Lee model for $76 and change.

It's not that the 62-year-old Portsmouth native doesn't like playing Cooter; Dukes-related events take up 90 percent of his time, and he said he considers the role 'something to accept with pride.' However, he does have other aspirations.

After two terms as a Georgia congressman, from 1988 to '92, he has made two failed runs for office -- both for Congress, one against former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich -- and he remains a political junkie. A T-shirt signing can turn into a fiery speech about redistricting or campaign finance, and he said he might like to write a syndicated column on such issues. He recently started performing a one-man show he wrote about Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean, and wants to finish a novel and a memoir he started five years ago.

Many residents of Rappahannock County, however, are sad to see Cooter's Place close. In a county with only 7,000 people, the loss of even a small business is noticed. And some said Jones, with his label-defying persona, was a good fit for a quirky region.

'He could speak to anyone,' said Chris Salmon, who helps run an online newspaper for Rappahannock County, 'and people enjoyed being around him.'

Even as his business career winds down, Jones is receiving a lot of attention for his latest role: nude model. Jones is Mr. February on a new calendar showing a variety of prominent local men participating at their regular activities -- motorcycle riding, beekeeping, having a drink at the local pub -- without clothes, although they are photographed strategically so as not to reveal everything.

The calendar, available at www.tmorc.com (which stands for 'The Men of Rappahannock County'), is the brainchild of two mothers who wanted to raise money to build a proper track for the high school.

The women had 1,000 orders for the $15 calendars even before they went on sale yesterday, despite criticism from some political candidates and writers of letters to the editor who say it is immoral, and reflects a schism in Rappahannock County between hippies who have a tradition of hosting nude gatherings and more conservative residents.

Jones, who posed as -- what else? -- a mechanic fixing a truck in front of a beautiful mountain backdrop, dismissed the controversy and said Rappahannock is like the country: 'Most folks are in the middle, just trying to find solutions to things.'

For the time being, Jones thinks closing Cooter's in Sperryville will be his solution for being too busy, although a second Cooter's museum-shop will remain open in Tennessee, near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Last week, he hosted two busloads of senior citizens who had come to the Sperryville museum from Fairfax for lunch and spent the afternoon chatting with visitors from places as far away as Cyprus and as close as Arlington.

'It's something they feel a great deal of affection for, it's a permanent part of Americana,' Jones said, pondering why the show and Cooter's continue to draw fans. 'But it's something else, too. It binds families, like baseball.' Then he paused.

'Heck, I don't know why people come!" (Michelle Boorstein, Washington Post, November 2, 2003)