Travel writer Terry Ward returns to the river house she knew as a child and thought she had outgrown. Follow her as she reclaims a lost sense of wonder in this, one of the state’s most timeless and fascinating places.
View of Carters Creek from the Tides Inn.
Photos by Mark Edward Atkinson
The Tides Inn in Irvington.
Old pickup truck outside the Hope and Glory Inn in Irvington.
Bay oysters on the half shell.
The marshy smell of the little canal running alongside the dock where fiddler crabs scurried in the mud. The eep-eep-eep warning cries of a mother osprey on high alert. The scratching of blue crabs piled atop blue crabs as they rustled about in bushel baskets.
These are the memories of the Virginia where I vacationed as I child, in the southern reaches of the Northern Neck. I am reminded of them every time I return from my home in Florida to visit my parents in the small town of White Stone in Lancaster County, where they retired from the hustle of the Washington, D.C., Beltway some 15 years ago.
When I was a kid growing up in Northern Virginia, my family would make the 3-hour drive south at least once a summer to visit my great aunt in her creaky old Victorian house along the Rappahannock River. By the time we reached the intersection in White Stone, with its quaint pharmacy and farmer stand, the crush of Interstate 95 traffic was a distant memory. I’d roll down the windows and swear we could smell the bay. And the only thing more exotic than shaking the crab traps out on my great-aunt’s dock was watching her cruise atop her riding mower, well into her 70s, still sporting a bright pink tube top and tanned biceps.
Once I was in my teens, however, the Northern Neck had mostly lost its appeal for me. It felt like the boonies, the domain of retirees and crusty fishermen. I much preferred to spend my summers at pool parties with friends back in NoVa.
Flash forward 20-some years and my parents live full-time in that creaky Victorian house in White Stone. There are still plenty of blue crabs to shake from traps down at the dock, and the same fisherman and his wife still live across the road.
As a travel writer, I have countless exotic destinations under my belt. But here, I am reminded that some of the biggest travel surprises await in those places we’re sure we have figured out.
Salt of the Earth
It’s well before dawn when Joe Hinson peers at a flag in his front yard, right across the street from the river on Windmill Point Road and east of White Stone, to gauge the wind direction.
It’s the middle of prime fishing season (April 1 through Dec. 1), and Hinson, 65, tall and lean with clear blue eyes and a shy demeanor, is doing what he’s always done—he’s a pound net fisherman. A pound net is one that has been strung between stakes placed in the bottom of the bay and funnels fish into another net where they’re caught and kept alive until they’re collected every morning.
Joe Hinson (center) of White Stone with his crew and his boat, the Miss Haley.
Hinson has been fishing menhaden—an oily relative of the herring prized as crab bait and for its use in Omega-3 supplements—in the Chesapeake and its tributaries since 1976.
There’s no sign marking the way to his docks, but locals—some of whom have been buying from Hinson for four decades—know where to find the narrow dirt track. The road dead ends at Antipoison Creek, where Hinson’s boat, the Miss Haley, usually docks sometime between 8 and 9 a.m. to offload a few bushels of menhaden to local crabbers before motoring across the creek to sell the rest of the catch to a commercial operation.
“Trout is what the locals get excited about, but I don’t always have it,” Hinson tells me as I buy a flounder from him and a half bushel of fresh crabs, “that and Spanish mackerel and blues.” (Menhaden isn’t good for eating—American Indians, the area’s first inhabitants, used it to fertilize their crops.)
Hinson’s favorite bay fish, he says, is one you won’t find on local menus—sand mullet, fried or boiled with salt and a pat of butter, prepared by his wife, Becky, a pound netter’s daughter who also grew up in the area.
Seafood is inextricable from the Northern Neck experience—it’s for sale at every turn, from hand-drawn signs along Route 3 hawking fresh steamed crabs to the elevated crab cake benedict proffered for breakfast on the Tides Inn’s terrace overlooking Carter’s Creek.
But it’s the Virginia oyster, more than anything, that has held the spotlight lately. The bivalve’s successful resurgence in the Chesapeake is thanks, in large part, to a multi-state effort over the past 20-plus years. Today, Virginia produces the bulk of the country’s farm-raised and wild-caught oysters.
Great oysters are everywhere in these parts, and many people, my parents included, even grow them right off their docks.
One beautiful Saturday, looking for something other than domestic dockside dining, I head to the Dog and Oyster Vineyard in Irvington—the winery of the Hope & Glory Inn—and find myself transported to what could just as easily be Provence as Virginia. A youthful crowd gathers around tables topped with bottles of rosé and overlooking the vines while an informal wine tasting is taking place in a screened-in building artfully littered with oyster shells.
Under a tent nearby, Bryan Byrd, a Northern Neck native who has sparkling blue eyes and appears to be in his late 20s or early 30s, is busy shucking oysters and cleaning live soft shell crabs for the fryer.
After several years in Key West, Byrd returned to the area to open his mobile oyster outfit, the Oyster Stand, which sets up in the vineyard Thursday through Saturday during the warmer months of the year. Byrd sources his oysters from two local purveyors: Windmill Point Oyster Company, owned by another enterprising young local, Michael Sledd, 31, and W. E. Kellum Seafood, the established fishery known for its wild-caught crop.
But it’s what Byrd does to the bivalves that’s truly magical, frying them up until they’re pillowy and piping hot and serving them inside warm tacos topped with Sriracha slaw. Deep-fried soft shell crabs sometimes appear on the menu, too, split open and topped with a caper remoulade.
“I strive to give everybody a taste of what I grew up with here in the Northern Neck,” says Byrd, a fourth generation waterman. “These are the things I grew up eating in Irvington, and I give them my own spin.”
New Life For A Historic Virginia Estate
The Dog and Oyster isn’t the area’s only winery. Just north of Kilmarnock, Good Luck Cellars offers tastings (and oysters, too, sometimes) on its wraparound porch or by the twin fireplaces inside. But it’s the promise of a new cidery opening soon nearby that sends me driving down leafy Ditchley Road.
“When you see a few black and white cows, turn left into the bricked driveway,” Cathy Calhoun, owner of Ditchley Cider Works, which is planned to open in 2018, told me when I called for directions.
When I pull up the long driveway, I’m met by an imposing sight. Ditchley, one of the Northern Neck’s most historic plantations, was built around 1762 by the great-grandson of Richard Lee: the property dates to 1651. For most of the 19th century, it was owned by the Ball family, of Mary Ball (mother of George Washington) fame and, later, by Jessie Ball duPont, the great American philanthropist. After duPont’s death, a foundation created by her heirs was responsible for the estate until Calhoun and her husband bought it in 2015.
The door to the house suddenly swings open and Cathy Calhoun, 57, greets me, a stick gripped tight in her hands.
“We have an uninvited guest,” she says calmly, shooing me inside. A black snake is coiled on the beautiful Georgian staircase, and Calhoun, who is small but strong and spry, looks like she’s jousting as she tries to coax it down to the landing. I nervously ask where the safe zone is. In less than a minute she has the intruder wrangled and slithering its way out the door and down the brick steps, “At least we don’t have to worry about putting out mouse poison for now,” she laughs.
Together with her husband Paul Grosklags, 57, Calhoun, who spent much of her early career leading heavy construction projects in the Navy’s Civil Engineer Corps, decided to buy Ditchley as a retirement project of sorts (the couple have long had a weekend home in the area, but only recently moved to the Northern Neck full time).
“We were deciding between doing something big enough to keep us both occupied or selling everything and moving out west to become ski bums,” she says. Indeed, there is plenty of restoration to keep them busy in the estate’s interior spaces, which will be turned into tasting rooms and a prep-kitchen for events held at the future cidery. Calhoun is doing much of the work herself. Within the year, she hopes to have her first pressing crop from her orchards’ 2,000 trees, most of which are 1600s- and 1700s-heritage varieties.
“I’ve been a home brewer for many years—wine, beer and cider,” she says, “But wineries are well established in Virginia, so we didn’t want to get in at the back of the pack with that. We thought a cidery was closer to an upward growth model for a business here.”
But there’s more going on: Ditchley’s new operations will include sustainable agriculture, too. Those cows I’d seen on the way in are already being sold for grass-finished beef, Calhoun tells me, and pigs turning the soil nearby will become part of a cider and meat share club she’s starting that will offer local pickup at Ditchley.
“There’s been a heavy focus here lately on trying to get tourism to include agri-tourism,” Calhoun says. “The area has a strong agricultural background and an up-and-coming retirement and tourism community,” she says, “From the standpoint of a craft beverage industry, all those factors are very supportive.”
Sunset view on the Middle Peninsula.
Water Water Everywhere
What has always been around—and crucial to tourism and transportation—in the Northern Neck is the water. During the steamship era, from the early 1800s until 1937, hundreds of passenger and cargo steamboats plied the rivers and creeks here on routes between Baltimore and Norfolk. Ferry service later connected Lancaster and Middlesex County, across the Rappahannock River, until the Norris Bridge (the crossing for State Route 3) was finally built in 1957. So it’s ironic that sometimes spotting the water can be a challenge, what with all the wheat and cornfields blocking the views.
One sunny morning, I spend a few hours with Gene Edmunds aboard his 25-foot boat, Nathalie. Edmunds, who retired from a corporate job years ago but still works part time as a captain at the Tides Inn, pulls comfy lounge chairs onto the boat’s broad deck and tosses off the lines before steering us out onto Carter’s Creek.
He offers just about any on-water experience you can imagine—from sunrise and sunset tours to stargazing outings and waterfront restaurant tours. We cruise along the glassy green waterway, and Edmunds slows the boat as we approach Kellum’s processing factory, where a mountain of oyster shells towers above the docks. He explains how they will be deposited back into the river by water canons on a nearby boat, creating a reef of sorts that will serve as a haven for future oysters to regenerate. “This is really something to see when it’s underway, the way the canons blast the oyster shells off the boat,” Edmunds tell me, “the boat’s waterline is so low [with the weight of the oyster shells], you wouldn’t believe it. … They probably have taken 40,000 bushels off this mound already this year.”
On another day, sailing captain Arabella Denvir shows me around the Rappahannock. A native of Ireland, she moved to the area from Malta with her husband to open Premier Sailing School, which she operates from the Tides Inn. Denvir gives me the helm of the 27-foot Catalina, one of many sailboats in her fleet. As we fly across the smooth waters, the scope of the river is fully evident only once we are out on it. “The word river is a bit misleading because it’s really a big, wide expanse of water,” she says.
Denvir has sailed all over the Caribbean and Mediterranean, so I ask her what she likes about living in this remote part of Virginia. She gazes at the horizon, then speaks in a nearly reverent tone.
“How quiet it is … How unspoiled it is. It’s slightly like stepping back in time here,” she says. “That’s why everyone loves living here. You come home and find a pile of vegetables on your doorstep from somebody else’s garden, people take care of each other.”
As I drive back to my parents’ house that afternoon, this little corner of the Northern Neck suddenly seems exotic to me again, and certainly a lot less lonely and trapped in time as I used to consider it.
Shipwright John Morgenthaler is renovating the last remaining steamboat pilothouse for the Steamboat Era Museum.
Cathy Calhoun, owner of Ditchley Cider Works.
Tony McDaniel, manager of Chao Phraya Thai and Sushi Grill.
Vintage book found in Kilmarnock.
I think back to a map of the peninsula I’d seen hanging in the house of the fisherman, Joe Hinson. “People always tell me I have it hung up the wrong way,” he told me.
Instead of being oriented to the cardinal points, as most maps would be displayed, Joe’s map is mounted sideways to line up with the perspective he has on the rivers and creeks running through his backyard.
It’s the perspective of a Virginia waterman, the way the water and land are laid out in his mind as he pulls away from his dock every morning and sails out to his pound nets.
And I realize I’m grateful to have gained a new perspective on a familiar place, too.
This article originally appeared in our October 2017 issue.
