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Out of the Oven Bakery
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Out of the Oven Bakery owners, husband and wife Cedric and Marie Sanders presenting one of their delicious pumpkin pies.
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Adrift owners, husband and wife Devin and Kati Rose with their seven-year-old son, River.
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The menus at Adrift consist of locally sourced, Bay and farm-to-table ingredients that are updated seasonally to offer the freshest options for the most sophisticated palettes.
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Old Farm Truck offers more than 150 different varieties of fruits and vegetables from more than a dozen Northern Neck farms.
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The Quays (pronounced “keys”) is an Irish bar, lounge and restaurant designed for a more intimate experience with a private dining room option.
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The Quays
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Walkabout Creek is Australian Outback inspired casual dining and sports bar with authentic Aussie cuisine.
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Dug in Farms started as an experiment in farming for owner Carolyn Quinn, and is located just off Route 3 between Kilmarnock and White Stone.
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It’s both big and little things that make a vibrant community and give it a sense of place and identity.
The combination is on display in White Stone, the southern gateway to the Northern Neck, home to 335 people—give or take a few come heres—undergoing a rejuvenation.
A big thing includes an $8.7 million, two-phase public sewer project financed by federal and state grants and loans. The project is a game-changer for White Stone, its people, its businesses and not to mention the local streams, rivers and bays and their aquatic occupants that know how stuff from the town’s aged septic systems flows down to the water.
White Stone has many big things. This includes the ongoing $1.4 million White Stone Neighborhood Improvement Project to rehabilitate moldering old houses and commercial structures—in some cases removing the blighted structures altogether to build something new.
Next up is an application in 2019 for $1.2 million in grant funds for a business district revitalization project that will reimagine and remake White Stone’s aged, gritty commercial core. Picture safely meandering around town on new sidewalks and crosswalks in a place that’s easy to traverse for young, old, and handicapped alike that has more and better parking and classy amenities like distinctive signage and light posts.
Together, the projects are putting White Stone on a trajectory to channel its prosperous heyday of the late 19th and early- to mid-20th centuries. A population boom isn’t imminent—the 1900 census of “White Stone District”counted 1,875 people, including 104 students at the public school—but town leaders envision a refashioned future for White Stone that benefits locals while giving visitors a reason to stop and linger.
The projects will allow White Stone to compete for tourism dollars with the standard bearers of charming, classy Chesapeake Bay towns that always make the “10 Best Towns” lists in the glossy coastal lifestyle magazines. You know the ones: St. Michaels, Cambridge and Chesapeake City in Maryland, or Cape Charles, Onancock and Urbanna in Virginia.
Which is one reason White Stone has pursued the projects, said Town Manager Patrick Frere, who lauds the past and present Town Council, Town Planning Commission Attorney Matson Terry, and others for the vision and determination to pursue the projects. The projects are expected to foster an economic renaissance that is already underway in White Stone as evidenced by new businesses in town and continued success of existing businesses.
“The best way to help the local economy is to allow existing small businesses the chance to expand,” Frere said.
The public sewage project involves construction of a wastewater treatment plant with a 40,000-gallon-per-day capacity at the east edge of town. Phase I of the project will connect more than 150 homes and businesses. It’s essential for the growth of small businesses in White Stone, said Lloyd B. Hubbard, mayor of White Stone from 1998-2014 and owner of Rappahannock Rentals.
“It opens up (building) lots for people to have more accessibility and to do things they want to do,” he said, adding it also will allow new businesses to set up shop in White Stone. “This central sewage system is something I’d been pressing for years and just couldn’t find a way to fund it.”
Things Smell and Taste Good Here
While public infrastructure projects are huge for the town, it’s a thousand little things that tie a community together and breathe life into its soul. In White Stone, breathe deeply because things smell great here.
And taste great. Such as the doughnuts, pastries, muffins, cookies and other sweets and treats at Out of the OvenBakery, started in September 2017 by Marie and Cedric Sanders. Their signature dessert is cheesecake—rather THE cheesecake—that locals swear is the best around. The community support has been great, Marie Sanders said.
“I’ve been surprised at how busy we’ve been,” she said.
Right across the street is a White Stone Institution, theRiver Market. Stop in for the fried chicken on Sundays or burgers or crab cakes any other day. Owners Jim and Mary McDaniels opened River Market 24 years ago in White Stone and from microbrews to soups, to dirty rice, and food for the weekend, customers leave very happy.
“This is the best burger right here,” said Wayne Lowe, finishing his lunch on a visit from Richmond on a recent Saturday with his wife Leah Lowe.
They had planned to eat somewhere else but decided to try River Market. Best decision they made all day. As they thanked Jim McDaniels for lunch, the owner started talking up his fried chicken.
“You’ll be happy with our fried chicken,” Jim McDaniels said. “If you’re not, I’ll give you your money back.”
“After we eat it all?” Wayne Lowe asked with a grin.
“After you eat it all,” McDaniels said.
Wayne Lowe said they would be back for the fried chicken.
A ‘Well Groomed’ Community
A White Stone resurgence has been long in the making.
White Stone was incorporated in 1953, encompassing one square mile. Its name is believed to have derived from one of two sources, according to local lore as documented by Elizabeth B. McKenney in a “History of the Town of White Stone Lancaster County, Virginia.”
One story has it originating in the early 1800s, centering around happenings along a small stream trickling out of the town’s eastern outskirts. A white stone located on the stream was where townspeople would go to hone their household or farm implements.
The alternative story presented by McKenney, an elementary teacher in White Stone High School from 1919 to 1941, is one to which she ascribes “more tangible evidence.” This theory traces the name back to the 1819 White Stone United Methodist Church deed, identifying a property boundary as “near the road leading by the whitestone.”
Regardless, White Stone traces its English settler roots back to the 1600s. Epaphroditus Lawson, born 1607 in England, arrived in Virginia around 1633, first acquiring by deed in 1635 some 200 acres at the head of Back River to the Poquoson, according to an 1896 edition of The VirginiaMagazine of History and Biography.
Lawson later patented 4,600 acres along the Rappahannock River in Lancaster County in 1649-50 at the present location of White Stone where he lived before his death in 1652.
About 200 years later White Stone found its groove. After 1870, McKenney writes, a prosperous community formed. Businesses included Sanders’ General Store, a Choral Hall doubling as a school and ’local entertainment and musical center,’ a mercantile operated by David R. James & Son, and another store with a second floor occupied by a millinery— fancy speak for women’s hat maker—who kept the “ladies of White Stone… well groomed,” McKenney writes.
The millinery isn’t around anymore, which isn’t to saythe ladies of White Stone aren’t still well groomed. And the Choral Hall and the mercantile and Sanders’ General Store are all historical footnotes.
But the White Stone evolution—or maybe it’s revolution— has definitely taken hold.
Eat Well, Live Well
It’s found in the succulent farm-to-table foodieness at Adrift Restaurant, where owners Kati and Devin Rose get nothing but five stars on social media reviews. Devin Rose is a White Stone native son and third-generation waterman who grew up in the restaurant business. The Roses have worked and interned at such fine dining destination establishments as The Inn at Little Washington in Washington, Virginia, and Aubergine at Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.
Adrift opened in April and offers three-course and five-course dining experiences in a tasting style with a focus on cuisine that is “coastal new American,” emphasizing ingredients from right in their backyard, Devin Rose said. Like Chesapeake Bay cobia that might be an hour old and produce, eggs, seafood and other fresh ingredients from Northern Neck farms and waters.
“The local support here has been amazing,” Devin Rose said.
Customers rave about the restaurant, including one recent reviewer from Alexandria, Virginia, who wrote on yelp.com that the restaurant blew their minds, in part thanks to the freshness and seasonal perfection of the ingredients.
“Adrift managed the perfect balance of sophisticated dining and Southern hospitality,” the reviewer wrote.
It’s found in plenty of places, actually. Such as the Rappahannock River view and signature hush puppies and drinks at Willaby’s Cafe. Or the locally-sourced produce such as blue potatoes, microgreens, heirloom tomatoes, sweet corn and organic and all-natural breads, artisanal cheese, and other tasty food and desserts at Old Farm Truck, where owner Jean Price says the “community has supported us tremendously.”
Northern Virginia restaurateur Graham Davies, has had a house in White Stone for 14 years, made the move permanently and bought the former White Stone School property. He’s opened two restaurants in the space: The Quays, a formal dining Irish pub and Walkabout Creek Pub, a more casual restaurant.
“There’s nothing like it on the Northern Neck,” Davies said.
And there’s the distinctive, like the vintage White Stone Pharmacy offering the essentials for the body such as prescriptions and health care products and the essentials for the mind like an eclectic selection of books that’s a mix of local lore, non-fiction and fiction.
Or for those who like the water there’s paddle boards at Docks of the Bay. Just up the road from White Stone is Dug In Farm, where owner Carolyn Quinn ditched Washington D.C. five years ago for the farm life. With grit and toil, Quinn’s roadside produce stand with fruits, vegetables, flowers and other food items sourced on the Northern Neck has grown five-fold this year.
“I am a lucky, lucky, lucky woman,” she said.
She has a message to owners of small Northern Neck farms specializing in fresh produce and niche products.
“Small growers, grow really well and I’ll buy everything you’ve got,” Quinn said.
Selling everything she’s got isn’t uncommon for LisaRose, manager of Miss Mary Seafood that’s owned by Tony Ferguson. A local waterman’s daughter, a recent Saturday found Rose up at 3 a.m. packing seafood and 12 hours later she had sold out of the shrimp, crab meat, fish, and scallops offered at her store at the south end of town. Rose supplies restaurants such as Adrift, Willaby’s and SandpiperRestaurant and locals have embraced her.
“We had no idea the love of fresh seafood would take off so fast,” Rose said.
She might have to get used to selling out of scallops, shrimp and fish. Because things are about to really get rolling in White Stone.