“At one time we’d sell 150 to 200 bushels of crabs wholesale every week, and we had more than forty daily shuckers when the oyster business was booming. Our oysters went up and down the East Coast from New Jersey to Georgia. In the summers I drove the delivery routes, but I didn’t like driving all that much,” Jimmy says.
The staff of Wilkerson’s over the years…
Herbert and Walter were among the first to pasteurize crabmeat, and also grew cultured oysters indoors at one time during the 1970s. The high cost of labor for shucking put an end to the oysters for distribution, and the scarcity of crabs ended the packing of crabmeat for sale sometime later. However, they still serve steamed crabs in season and continue to plant and harvest oysters, which are sold to a local shucker and packer. Some of those oysters come back to be served in the restaurant. Jimmy and his son, Jay, catch the majority of the rockfish they serve in the restaurant in the Potomac River.
Over the years the restaurant was updated and expanded to add a second dining room to meet capacity demands. Their signature seafood combinations and all-you-can-eat seafood buffet are legendary in the area. Each Thanksgiving, they offer a popular Thanksgiving–style buffet for those who choose to forego cooking and cleaning up. After Thanksgiving, they close for the remainder of the year and open again for business at the end of January.
Jimmy’s son, Jay, worked in the restaurant growing up. After studying computers in college, he worked for a few years after graduation at nearby Dahlgren. “I always knew I would be coming back here someday,” Jay says. He has been working alongside his father in the family business for more than ten years now, continuing the family tradition.
While much of their focus is on the restaurant and seafood, they also spend a lot of time on their farming operation, which took on a more prominent role after the wholesale distribution business’s decline. Soon after Jimmy returned home from college, he spearheaded the beginning of that operation starting with just seventy acres. That has grown significantly over the years and is now approaching four thousand acres, though that acreage has fluctuated recently.
“There’s a whole lot of concrete being planted these days,” Jimmy says with obvious regret. Good farmland available to work is hard to find.
One of the things both Jimmy and Jay love about their business is that while it’s a family operation, those who’ve worked there for years become part of the family, too. One current employee has been with the restaurant thirty-nine years, and another recently retired after first picking up trash around the restaurant when his mother brought him to work with her when he was just thirteen.
“We also hire a lot of kids for summer jobs,” Jay says. “They start out washing dishes and busing tables just like I did, and move up from there. Once they get on here, most of them don’t want to leave and stay on for the duration of their high school years, some even longer.”
They have all learned to work quickly to keep the tables turning over and the lines of customers moving. Jay’s son, Derek, is already learning to bus tables and help out where he can, the same way Jay started out.
What Jimmy finds most gratifying is seeing people who come back to Colonial Beach over the years and have a lot of memories tied to this unique little beach town. He smiles when he adds, “It’s nice that this restaurant is one of them.”
LAS VEGAS ON THE POTOMAC
I am sometimes told by forward-thinking newcomers to Colonial Beach that I am living in the past, that the heyday I remember with such nostalgia will never be again. And while they may well be right, I can’t help thinking about how idyllic it all was to a youngster growing up in what seemed to be a full-scale amusement park with nonstop activity all around us during those years when casinos dotted the boardwalk and there was a wide variety of entertainment all within walking distance from home. People-watching, which perhaps prepared me well for writing books, provided endless fascination.
A number of years back I was in the process of renovating the old Baptist parsonage in town to become a bookstore and gift shop. The windows were open to let in the mild spring breeze. Suddenly I could hear an announcement coming over a loudspeaker from the nearby waterfront, calling people to the upcoming boat rides. That sound, that beckoning announcement, took me right back to the boardwalk’s heyday and my youth.
It’s said that scent stirs memories, but for me it was that crackly sound and its message hinting that an adventurous outing on the water was just a few minutes away. How many times over the years had I heard that same announcement as my friends and I played cards on a blanket by the lifeguard stand on the beach just yards away from the pier where those boats docked?
There was so much fun back then. Sure, we were kids, and fun was our goal in life, but there were few places like Colonial Beach in that era. The pink plane that brought gamblers to town on champagne flights seemed incredibly glamorous. A ride on the little train that circled around under a moonlit sky was always a treat. Miniature golf was great for an evening’s entertainment. And the merry-go-round was so indelibly etched on my memory that it became the centerpiece of one of my Trinity Harbor books—Ask Anyone—in which I
