Archive Record
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Metadata
Title |
"5 Great Reasons Visit Urbanna," includes profile of Larry Chowning |
Collection |
Chesapeake Bay Magazine Articles by Larry Chowning |
Catalog Number |
2020.9.3.17 |
Date |
September, 2008 |
Scope & Content |
Chesapeake Bay Magazine, Vol. 38, No. 5, Pgs. 43-47 5 Great Reasons Visit Urbanna Packed with cozy places and wonderfully charming people, this Tidewater Virginia town can give Heaven a run for its money. We all have our own idea of heaven, but mine was reinventing itself into this Tidewater Virginia town. WHEN I DIE AND GO TO HEAVEN, I HAVE IT ON good authority that it’s going to be just like Urbanna, Va. Everyone who lives there certainly believes it, and, hey, who am I to disagree? In fact, 1 can’t wait to get started. I’ll head for the Pearly Gates by boat (of course) on the shoulders of a sturdy northerly, careening down the Bay with a following sea nipping at my heels, before turning at Windmill Point to meet the wide embrace of the Rappahannock. Here the water will be as-seen-from-space blue and sparkling like the diamond counter at Cartier. My boat will gallop along on a fine broad reach, as the Route 3 bridge rises out of the horizon to meet me. Once under the bridge, I’ll tighten sail and take aim for Urbanna Creek on the southern shore. There I’ll drop anchor and dinghy in to the dinghy dock at the Town Marina. Leaping gracefully (this is my heaven, remember) up onto the clock, I’ll make a beeline up Virginia Street to Marshall’s Drug Store to find a seat at the celestial lunch counter. After a cup of coffee or two (there will be coffee in my heaven), I’ll stroll back down the hill to Payne’s Crab House, where I’ll stop to chat with the Payne sisters—Catherine Via and Beatrice Taylor—and Gary Thimsen, an enthusiastic Urbannite whom I’d met on an earlier visit and who now had appoinled himself my official guardian angel in Urbanna, and local restaurateur and popular purveyor of ice cream, Mr. Moo. Out on the creek, crabbers will glide by in long and elegant deadrises, white as cumulous clouds. Ouch! Thai was me, pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t really dead and gone to heaven. Nope, guess not... and yet, when I looked around me, it was all just the same. The Payne sisters, Thimsen, Mr. Moo, the water sparkling in the midmorning sun. Everything was just so right. No wonder I had to pinch myself. We all have our own idea of heaven, but mine seemed to be reinventing itself into this tiny Tidewater Virginia town. Things had been going right ever since I had rounded Windmill Point after a hot night on the hook in Little Bay. My boat had fairly hummed up the Rappahannock from the Bay, making quick work of the 13-mile trip upriver to Urbanna Creek. And my visit to Marshall’s Drug Store had been thoroughly charming, in a Wally and the Beaver kind of way. The store’s long lunch counter makes a serpentine "W" across the back quarter of the store with the stools repeating the pattern like so many connect the dots. The low and open layout makes general conversation easy and apparently inevitable. 1 sipped my coffee and absorbed the activity around me. Seated across from me. a teenager amiably offered to leave her breakfast sand- wich and iced tea to fetch her grandmother’s prescription, returned with the medicine and the pharmacy book to sign and then trotted back to the pharmacy counter with the money. They continued to eat their sandwiches and catch up on the doings of friends and family. A slim man in a bright blue short-sleeve shirt sat down and began to describe to a nearby woman (and, perforce, the lunch counter in general) how he had watched a sailing class make its way up Christchurch Creek the day before in a good headwind. All conversations were suspended momentarily while everyone turned to kid three young men from a local boatyard who had just come in to pick up lunch. ‘Are you getting it to go?" one person asked. "Yes," they replied. "Good," someone else sallied. Everyone laughed. 1 guess you had to live here. A few minutes later, local boatwright Carl Dize came in, tall and spare and slightly bent, unassuming yet clearly possessing a special standing in the community, like some Jimmy Stewart. "Hey, Mr Dize!" called one of the three young waitresses warmly. Dize sat near the man in the blue shirt and the woman he’d been chatting with and picked up a conversation as if he might have left it on the counter the day before. By this time 1 had finished my coffee. I leaned over to the cash register, which was just to my left, and paid up. On the way out, i admired the juxtaposition of traditional drug-store mer- chandise with tchotchkes. It was also like that next door at Bristow’s, where 1 wandered next. Bristow’s dates to 1876 and still looks for all the world like a 19th-century department store, despite the juxtaposition of old-style sewing notions and racks of upscale leisure shirts and skirts. In other words, there’s a lot of old-style shopping, but with resort wear and souvenirs thrown in. Tourists are tourists, after all, and Urbanna knows that with a population of only about 550, it’s the tourists who make possible its generous supply of good restaurants and boutiques Most of its visitors are daylrippers from nearby Grey’s Point and Beth Page camp- grounds, who browse the boutiques, patronize the restaurants and stroll past the town’s historic buildings, but do not stay the night. Visiting boaters and weekenders from Richmond and Norfolk add to the summer buzz. All of that helps support the local economy, but it is the city’s annual Oyster Festival that rockets the population from the hundreds to the tens of thousands over one weekend every November. It was then, after leaving Bristow’s, that I found myself chatting with the Payne sisters. Thimsen, my guide to the good, was there be- fore me. Thimsen was doing his utmost to help me see the Urbanna he loves. He pushed me a little in this direction, prodded me a little in that, made introductions, called ahead, fed me—and half the people we stopped to see—his personal- recipe crabcakes, and generally made sure I met one interesting and delightful person after another in a town seemingly chockablock with Cruiser's Digest: Urbanna, Va. The entrance to Urbanna Creek lies about 15 miles up the Rappahan- nock River from the Windmill Point bell and about 6 miles beyond the Route 3 bridge. From the time you reach the creek's first marker, flashing red "2", it is advisable to keep within the channel since the depths drop rapidly. But channel depths are at least 7 feet and in many places considerably more. The channel makes a sharp turn to port at flashing green "5"to round Bailey Point. All of the marinas are to starboard. The first is Urbanna Town Marina at Upton's Point (804-758-5440), followed by Dozier's Port Urbanna Yachting Center (804-758-0000, doziermarine.com) and then Urbanna Yachting Center (804-758-2342, www.urbannayachts.com). Urbanna Yachting Center has fuel and all three marinas have transient dockage and amenities such as electric and showers. Port Urbanna, Urbanna Yachting Center and Campbell's Marine Service (804-758-2232, cameronmanne.com), also located on Urbanna Creek, have full repair facil- ities and marine supplies. Urbanna Auto & Marine Sales (804-758-5300), at 271 Prince George St., a short walk into town, is also a good source of boating supplies. While on the creek, you'll want to take time to admire its many classic Bay workboats, a number of which were built—and are still being built—locally. If you are looking for a cozy berth ashore, you can pull up to the dock at Urbanna's new hotel, Liberty at Compass Quay (804- 758-1100, www.compassquay.com) or book a room at one of its two bed and breakfasts, Atherston Hall (804-758-2809) and Inn at Urbanna Creek (804-758-4661). Restaurants abound and nearly all are within easy walking distance of Urbanna Creek, including differ- ently gourmet Cafe Mojo (804-758-4141), Moo's River's Edge Eatery (804-758-5344), Virginia Street Cafe (804-758-3798) and Marshall's Drug Store (804-758-5344). For a list of Urbanna's other restaurants as well as its shops and boutiques, see www.urbanna.com. Lansdowne is Urhanna's architectural jewel. them. It’s little wonder that I was constantly confusing Urbanna with nirvana. Now at Payne’s, we four settled at a table in the cool shade between the crabhouse’s tiny kitcherVoffice building and its peeler tank/storage room. The Payne sisters have attracted a lot of attention over the years because of their distinc- tion as pretty much the only waterwomen in a world of watermen. Not that they would draw the distinction themselves. To them, it is a natural extension of their upbringing in a family with a long tradition of working on the water. The younger of the two, Beatrice Taylor, is Virginia’s only licensed woman commercial crabber. She is also, I discovered, Urbanna’s new mayor— not that I had gone looking for a mayor (who does, really?), but in a town this small you tend to get a certain amount of duplication. We set politics aside, however, as we chatted about the past and the present in Urbanna, which is to say, centuries of oysters in abundance, followed by decades of crabs in abundance, followed by recent years of meager catches, and finally a sad but fatalistic shake of the head over the future. The Payne family came to Urbanna from Tangier Island shortly after the infamous August Storm of 1933, which flooded Tangier so thor- oughly that soon afterward many families left the island for good. Catherine Via, the elder of the sisters, recalls the remarkable sight of big oyster boats floating in her yard. "1 remember being carried in my aunt’s arms from our house to hers, which was a little higher up," she said. "My brother and I thought it was very exciting, but as she held us our feet were kicking water— it was that high." Their father, Avery Payne, soon moved to Urbanna and bought a house before sending for the rest of the family. Everyone, aunts, uncles, children moved into the house. "It was big enough," said Taylor, who was born after the family moved to Urbanna. "I live in it now." In the 1950s, Avery Payne purchased J.W. Hurley & Son Seafood from Boyd Hurley and changed the name to Payne’s. In 1987, Payne died suddenly, of a heart attack, while out crab- bing. It was the middle of the season, and the two sisters decided to finish it out with the help of other family members. Then they resolved to carry on the business. They continue to sell retail out of their small crab shack, with Taylor and a nephew running the pots and Via sorting the soft shell crabs and putting them through By 1:30 p.m. on Friday, the first day of 2007's 50th Urbanna Oyster Festival, the Lions Oyster Fritters line collided with the Cream of Crab Soup line, smack in the middle ofVirginia Street. It occa- sioned both a log jam to pedestrian traffic and a brief discussion on the relative merits of one seafood specialty over the other. "You can't beat this crab soup anywhere!" declared a cheerful older couple from Leesburg, Va."We come from Baltimore every year just for these fritters!"countered a young couple. No one was persuaded to jump line, and before long a police officer gently but firmly shooed both ines back against the sidewalk. By noon the following day, the line of cars along Route 227 snaked back nearly to U.S. 17, some six miles away, and Virginia Street was one cig conga line of hungry people, waiting their turn at one of the festival's 50 booths. That's the way it is for two days every November, when the Urbanna Oyster Festival attracts tens of thousands of people to this otherwise quiet Rappahan- nock town. In addition to serving oysters and other Chesapeake seafood every which way, the fes- tival features parades, traditional Chesapeake watercraft, an oyster- shucking contest and plenty of music. Last year, the festival's sole surviving organizer, Liz Newbill, re- called that the first oysters sold at the festival were three big fritters atop a homemade biscuit for 25 cents. The booth made $50. These days, oyster fritters sell for $5 each and the booth grosses $40,000. The 51 st Urbanna Oyster Festival will be held Friday and Saturday, November 7 and 8. For more infor- mation, call 804-758-0368 or visit www.urbannaoysterfestival.com. Jermaine Brokenborough, winner of the 2007 men’s professional division, at the Urbanna Oyster Festival. |
Source |
Chowning, Larry |
Imagefile |
010\20209317.JPG |