Williamsburg Pottery

Williamsburg Pottery, 1978
Photo by Doris Benson Wildenberger,
descendant of early property owner. 

The rebirth of the Williamsburg Pottery is all the buzz this week after yesterday's big press conference. According to the founder's wife, the Pottery will be reborn in 146,800 square feet of retail space sandwiched between Richmond Road and the railroad tracks.

What's going to fill up the three and a third acres? All of the stuff that's made the Pottery famous, including ceramics, custom framing, floral arrangements, and low priced imported items as well as some new retail categories. Food will be an important part of the plan, with a cafe, bakery, and deli with indoor and outdoor seating. The across-the-tracks property will be used as warehouse space.

Since researching and writing Images of America: James City County last year, it's hard for me not to see traces of the past and think at what lies beneath newer developments. As a new Pottery is proclaimed, I find myself remembering the history of that land.

In the late nineteenth century, much of James City County was sparsely populated. The central part of the James-York Peninsula, approximately 12 miles across, had been twice ravaged by war. In the built up to and following the last significant battle of the Revolutionary War at Yorktown, the area was occupied by French and Continental forces as they waited for George Washington. British troops coming up from the south had marched, camped, and fought through the area, most famously against Lafayette and "Mad Anthony" Wayne at the Battle of Green Spring in July of 1781. Less than a century later, in the 1860s, the future Williamsburg Pottery land was trampled by troops during the Peninsula Campaign, as they fought their way from Hampton to the Confederate Capital in Richmond. Union forces occupied the City of Williamsburg during the Civil War and old families along Forge Road tell tales of unhappy cooperation, intrigue, and survival in the surrounding countryside.

About 15 years after the Civil War, the poor and largely unoccupied land was noted by entrepreneurs. Coal was coming out of the mountains to the west. The Chesapeake and Ohio Rail Railway extended its line down the Virginia Peninsula from Richmond to Newport News, where coal was deliver to the Hampton Roads port. Land agent Carl Bergh hatched a plan to build a town here, about midway between, so that the train would also be used to transport crops and people. He enticed Scandinavians who had settled in the Midwest to resettle in Tidewater Virginia, where the climate was mild and there was plenty of cheap or abandoned farmland. The town of Norge became a center of Norwegian settlement. Others resettled nearby. They could take their crops to railway stations at Lightfoot, Norge, and Toano for shipment to distant markets.

The Benson Farm

Ingeborg Houg, a Norwegian emigrant, resettled from Wisconsin to Lightfoot on an 80-acre farm in 1907. She left the property to her son, Bennett Benson, who had taken care of the farm for her after her husband's early passing. Benson's brother, Alfred (pictured on the cover of James City County), lived a short distance east on Richmond Road. He was the Lightfoot railroad station agent and brother of Bennett.

While collecting photographs for Images of America: James City County, I had the pleasure of meeting Doris Benson Wildenberger, daughter of Alfred, niece of Bennett, and granddaughter of Ingeborg. You can still see two large trees in the median just east of the Pottery entrance where Doris and her siblings caught the bus to Toano School. The Pottery land is right in the midst of what was the happening end of James City County before Colonial Williamsburg came to town. Back then, Toano was downtown and the largest and most lively settlement hereabouts.

It was in 1938, shortly after the two-lane road was paved, that Bennett Benson sold Jimmy Maloney an acre of land along the Richmond Road frontage of his farm. Maloney built his first pottery kiln and sold pottery seconds to tourists who had recently rediscovered Jamestown and Williamsburg. Maloney bought more land and eventually he bought the farm. He added seconds of clothing and decorative wares that kept growing and growing until the outlet became a multimillion-dollar business and a leading Virginia tourist destination.

When I drive through Lightfoot these days, I look toward the Pottery and see the ghost of an old four-square farmhouse. I image the Bensons and their family and friends. Other times I see soldiers walking and riding along the muddy Old Stage Road. Finally, I think of a time when Native Virginians used the well-worn path along the Virginia Peninsula's ridge to make their way through thickly forested land.

I wish the new Pottery well. However, I doubt that it will be as famous as it once was. Today it competes in a Williamsburg arena that features more than one such outlet complex. Tourists have lots of options and Wal-mart fills the needs of locals looking for a bargain. A trip to the Pottery isn't, and hasn't been for the last decade or two as essential as it was back in the day.