One group of friends in town, all senior citizens, rotated among the various restaurants for dinner every night. I have no idea if they stuck to the same menu selections, but that routine was rarely varied.
In the very early years seafood was definitely king at most of the local restaurants. People debated over which one had the best crab cake, the best steamed crabs or the best hush puppies on the side. Whatever any individual’s preference, one thing held true: the eateries were all packed with locals and visitors on the weekends.
For years along Monroe Bay Avenue, parking lots were jammed from Dockside at the Colonial Beach Yacht Center at the Point, to Parker’s midway along the bayside road and on to Miller’s Crab Shore at the opposite end. Dockside is still serving dinners and offering weekend entertainment, but Parker’s is gone, replaced by a house and an empty lot that’s still for sale. Miller’s has changed hands a couple of times and is now serving Thai-French food under the Lighthouse name.
Many other restaurants in town have come and gone, but one name is constant, Wilkerson’s. The family-owned restaurant at the entrance to town has been in business for decades, though not without a bit of family squabbling over the years. Here’s the story of the Wilkerson family and their ties to seafood and to the restaurant that bears their name.
A NAME SYNONYMOUS WITH SEAFOOD:
The Wilkersons
Anyone driving into Colonial Beach on the two-lane road into town knows Wilkerson’s. Perched on a narrow spit of land that backs up to the Potomac River, it’s been a landmark restaurant for decades. Before the nearby Harry Nice Bridge was built connecting Maryland and Virginia on Route 301, a primary north-south highway, ferryboats brought passengers, cars and even cattle to docks just beside the restaurant.
Though that tiny stretch of road in front of the restaurant is referred to as Potomac Beach, it’s now considered part of the town of Colonial Beach.
What newcomers may not know and what a few old-timers remember well is that way back there were two Wilkerson restaurants, maybe one hundred yards apart, competing for customers on their way into town.
“The family has been in the seafood business for a long time,” Jimmy Wilkerson, owner of the existing restaurant, recalls. “My great-grandfather, Stephen Wilkerson, started the first restaurant in the early 1930s.”
It was a natural fit to complement the local seafood industry that most men in the area with the last name of Wilkerson worked in.
Stephen had four sons—William E., Herbert, Butch and Albert—and all had a hand in the restaurant in one way or another, whether it was catching the seafood or helping to run the day-to-day operations.
“When Dad [Walter, Herbert’s son] came home after World War II ended, it was already crowded, and there was no room for him in the restaurant,” Jimmy says. “So in 1946, Herbert and Walter purchased land down the street and started a second restaurant, where Herbert and his wife, Florence, and Walter and his wife, Catherine, all worked together to get the new business going.”
There was no business connection between the two restaurants, despite the family ties and their proximity.
Tensions mounted when Walter applied for a liquor license and his uncle fought it. “There was right much friction at the time,” Jimmy says. “They all had right much of a temper.”
Friction or not, the two restaurants coexisted for years. Walter’s sister, Ellen, later began working in the family business. Walter and Catherine’s son, Jimmy, grew up working in and learning the business, as well.
Ellen Wilkerson
Jimmy went away to school to the Fork Union Military Academy during his high school years, then attended college in North Carolina. When he came back in 1970, Jimmy was ready to follow in his father’s footsteps by continuing to operate the restaurant and staying in the seafood business.
Jimmy remembers growing up when Colonial Beach was “a robust little town.” His father and Denny Conner, one of the brothers who brought casinos and a lot of entertainment to the boardwalk, were close friends. He’d go down to the boardwalk as a child to ride the amusement park rides.
His father had a business strategy that took into account people’s gambling habits. Because of the restaurant’s location, he liked to catch their attention when they drove into town. “He tried to get them when they were coming in, when he could sell them seafood dinners. On the way out, they were more likely to buy hamburgers,” Jimmy says.
After Stephen passed away, the first Wilkerson’s restaurant was then run by his son, William E., and later was passed on to his children, Louis, Helen and Stephen. Soon after that transition, Louis came to work for Herbert and Walter after a falling out. When the first location closed in the late ’70s, Helen and Stephen joined Louis in working at the current location, as well. Helen, who died in May 2017, was a beloved waitress there for many years.
The Happy Clam after Hurricane Isabel
Wilkerson’s dining room after Hurricane Isabel
The original restaurant was later reopened as The Happy Clam, which operated for a number of years, but was destroyed by Hurricane Isabel when it hit Colonial Beach in the fall of 2003. It was not rebuilt, though it did operate for a time at another location in town.
The current Wilkerson’s was severely damaged by that September storm as well, but Jimmy had workers on the job almost immediately after, assessing the damage. He reopened the following spring. Wilkerson’s is qualified now as the longest continuously running restaurant business in town, celebrating its seventieth anniversary in 2016.
From the late 1940s through the 1970s, Herbert Wilkerson & Sons Inc. had a thriving wholesale seafood business distributing green crabs, oysters in the shell, oysters shucked and packed on the premises, crabmeat, fresh
