On this evening, a retired architect, a retired contractor, a retired DuPont executive, a retired John Deere executive, a retired Chrysler employee, an art gallery owner and an ophthalmologist (still working), among others, are hunkered around a few corner tables, trading gossip and laughs between sips of a 2005 Napa Cab, a 2005 Côtes du Rhône and a 2004 Grenache Noir from California, to name a few of the eight bottles Watson has happily plunked on his tables. Ron Mihills, the former DuPont exec, does some quick math—eight wines, offered weekly—and says, “There aren’t many places in the world where you can taste about 400 wines a year.”
True, and there aren’t many places with quite the vibe of the Northern Neck—and more specifically the little trio of towns, White Stone, Irvington and Kilmarnock, which together have attracted a lot of well-to-do former businessmen and their wives to Lancaster County, and its Chesapeake Bay lifestyle. Lancaster is said to be one of the demographically oldest counties in Virginia, and it’s also one of the wealthiest. The three towns are adjacent to one another—a little triangular community linked by routes 200 and 3. Kilmarnock (population 1,250) is the commercial hub; Irvington (population 700), where the Tides Inn can be found, is a tiny upscale enclave; and White Stone (population 350) is the southern gateway to the Northern Neck.
Until very recently, the area was known for its farmland and easy-going watermen, so it’s hard to imagine that this pocket of old Virginia was a rollicking place in the 19th and early 20th centuries, during the steamship era. Between 1813 and 1930s, a dozen or so steamships plied the coastal waterways. Some would leave Baltimore and move down the bay to Norfolk, then come up the Rappahannock River and dock at Irvington and other towns. In those days, the area teemed with wharves, fishing villages and canneries. “Steamboats were our lifeline—our social and economic connection to the world,” says Anne Long McClintock, a board member of the five-year-old Steamboat Era Museum in Irvington. Her grandfather was the captain of the steamship Potomac, whose old pilothouse sits on the museum lawn. “Everything that people here wanted and bought came by steamboat. We got Baltimore newspapers and knew more about Baltimore than Richmond.”
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Northern Neck culture and it's future
Posted by Richard Pleasants August 26, 2010 13:35:20
Raised not born
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Come-heres
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Come Heres
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