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Urbanna's town marina is at Upton’s Point on Urbanna Creek.
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Cameron Davidson
Middlesex County native Deborah Pratt can shuck twenty-four oysters in less than three minutes. She’s won numerous state and national championships and competed in the International Oyster Opening Championship in Ireland. Her favorite competition? The Urbanna Oyster Festival Shucking Contest where she will celebrate thirty-three years strong this November as their champion.
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Entrance to Urbanna over the bridge.
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Marshall’s Drug Store is an old-fashioned family drugstore with four generations of Marshalls behind the counter.
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“If we don’t have tourism, we can’t succeed. We have to create reasons for people to come here.” Karen Lowe, owner of Lowe Tide in Urbanna, VA.
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Oyster shell and driftwood gifts and décor are available at Lowe Tide.
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Owners of Urbanna Harbor Gallery & Art Services, Barbara Hartley and Cloyde W. Wiley III
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Canoes and kayaks perfect for cruising Urbanna Creek.
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Atherston Hall Bed & Breakfast
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Inside foyer of the quaint Atherston Hall Bed & Breakfast in Urbanna.
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Ladies boutique and gift shop, Cyndy’s Bynn.
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Home and garden store, Make Thyme.
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Something Different Restaurant & Retail specializing in fine Neanderthal Cuisine.
Over the past few years, while Virginians’ attention was elsewhere, Urbanna got seriously cool.
It’s always been the little town that could. After all, how many towns with a population of fewer than 500 could host an annual festival welcoming more than 50,000 visitors over just two days? But Urbanna has become so much more than just the charming setting for the best annual oyster festival on the east coast.
Myriad factors have contributed to transitioning a sleepy waterfront town into a popular and energized destination year round.
“Our greatest resource is our deep-water port,” says Larry Chowning, Urbanna’s unofficial historian and a writer for the local newspaper, the Southside Sentinel. “That’s what created Urbanna and that can’t be taken away from us.”
Prior to establishing Urbanna as a tobacco port, the crop had been shipped from individual plantation docks, but the town represented the first deep-water port on the south side of the Rappahannock River, making it the logical outgoing nexus for ocean-bound commerce.
“They’d roll hogsheads down the hill here to the docks,” says Paul Malone, a clinical psychologist and part-time re-enactor who moved to Urbanna from Texas and fell in love with the area’s rich history. “The high bluffs protected ships in the creek and the old store was the first Super Walmart for colonists. Urbanna became the center of commerce for the whole area.”
But farmers learned the hard way that there wasn’t enough money in tobacco and shifted the town’s focus to its greatest asset: oysters.
A fascinating history lessons awaits the curious at the Urbanna Visitors Center, housed in the 1766 Old Tobacco Warehouse, where an entire room is devoted to colorful displays detailing the history of oystering and the process of cultivation.
It’s also where the single most important map in American history is hung. The Mitchell Map, hand drawn and water colored in 1754 by Urbanna resident Dr. John Mitchell for the second Earl of Halifax, was commissioned to assist the British in deciding what to do with the colonies.
Mitchell had the distinction of drawing the boundaries of the colonies—he extended Virginia all the way to the Mississippi River—as well as claiming Indian territories as British and deciding the boundary between the colonies and New France, now Canada.
This map, which was used to negotiate land rights as early as 1776, after the American Revolution, and as late as 1980 to determine fishing rights off the coast of Maine, was purchased by the town of Urbanna and restored in 2012, and it is a major source of civic pride for the town’s residents.
“It represents all the history of Urbanna and the beginnings of our country,” Malone says with the obvious satisfaction of a history buff. “Everyone can get a sense of connectedness to this map.”
And while the map points to where Urbanna came from, old John Mitchell would scarcely recognize the vibrant town it’s become in the twenty-first century.
Big events are scheduled every month of the year to draw visitors and celebrate small-town life. “If we don’t have tourism, we can’t succeed,” says Karen Lowe, president of the Urbanna Business Association. and last year’s Citizen of the Year. “We have to create reasons for people to come here.”
Mayor Steve Holberg agrees. “It’s a team effort. If someone comes to us with an idea, we try to throw money and energy at it to make it happen. The town’s getting energized.
Different people are finding different connections here and bringing their enthusiasm. There’s a lot of collaboration.”
Because visitors so seldom came during off-season, the town council members put on their collective thinking caps and created reasons to change that situation. In February, they host a Polar Plunge and chili cook-off, and in April, they host 5K and 10K runs to benefit breast cancer research. May’s cocktail boat races have proven to be a boisterous, warm-weather, all-day extravaganza. June’s Arts in the Middle—a play on Middlesex County—boasts over 100 artists displaying and selling work.
In the summer months, it’s a monthly farmers’ market, Music under the Stars at the waterfront, and a sparkling fireworks display on Independence Day. A Founders’ Day celebration is held on Labor Day. October is especially busy, first with a wine and oyster stroll and then with Crawl-o-ween, a progressive happy hour that moves from restaurant to restaurant. “Everyone has a great time and there’s no formality to it at all,” says councilman Joe Heyman.
November’s oyster fest is legendary and it’s followed by the two-day Urbanna holiday house tour, which includes brunch and a fashion show. Many of these events were launched and underwritten by the Urbanna Business Association. “The collaboration between the Urbanna Business Association, citizens, and town council is key to these nonoyster events getting traction,” says Holberg.
But visitors are welcome any time, not just for special events. The town is taking a page from a tradition begun in Europe as it works on creating Museum in the Street: self-guided walking tours. As a way to connect the past with the present, signs will feature photography to indicate why buildings are significant and where buildings previously stood.
“It’ll be a way of acquainting people with our history,” Chowning says. “We have history from the Colonial period, the antebellum period, and Reconstruction. Urbanna follows the path of American history.”
A big part of that history involves the oyster industry, which has been getting a boost from the Restore Urbanna Creek initiative whose goal is to restore a thriving population of oysters to the creek.
Because of its compact size, the town has always been popular as a cruising port, a place for boaters to pull in, restock, and enjoy a restaurant meal or some shopping. The marina has recently been rebuilt with all new floating docks.
“Everything you need, you can walk to from the marina,” Heyman says. “It’s an easy stroll to the grocery store or any store to pick up what you need.”
Visitors making their way through Urbanna are likely to be impressed with its friendliness and small-town feel. Malone points to how his wife can take an hour to walk a few blocks because of the sheer number of people she knows and stops to talk to. There’s a real sense that everyone in the town is part of a larger whole.
“We profit from the vision of people in the past,” Chowning says. “We’ve got an oyster festival because fifty-eight years ago, a few guys were sitting around and came up with the idea for it. We were lucky to have people with that vision in the past. But we’ve had people like that all along. The next generation will profit from what we’re doing today.”
For more information go to urbanna.com.