Seven on 11

Originally appeared in the Washington Post "Weekend" section
Friday, March 8, 2002
Page WE232

Although it is little more than an hour from the heart of the District, Virginia's Shenandoah Valley can feel like a world away and then some. Here, with the Blue Ridge Mountains rolling along by your side, you can still find scrubbed and polished kids beaming next to their scrubbed and polished 4-H steers. Everyone turns out for the annual county fair; Old Order Mennonites still travel by sober, black horse-drawn carriages; and the waitresses call you "dear" and mean it.

"It's like going back in time. It's so hard to believe that something that feels this remote is so close to D.C.," says Andrea Sutcliffe, author of "Touring the Shenandoah Valley Backroads" and a transplanted NoVA-ite who now makes her home in a Valley town so small you could trip over the "Welcome" sign and hit your head on the "Now Leaving" one.

It's a place for getting away from it all without having to get very far away, and one of the best ways to sample its true flavor is to meander down the historic Old Valley Pike—U.S. Route 11—as it winds past farmers' fields and over rivers and through various name changes and no-stoplight towns where the houses crowd up to the roadway and the junk shops really are.

Stretching the length of Virginia and beyond, the road has a long and fraught history: Originally a Native American footpath, it became a major artery in the westward migration of European settlers and later saw extended, bitter and bloody duty in the battles and troop movements of The War (in the Valley, you don't have to ask which one).

Wandering Route 11, you never know what unusual, unexpected and otherwise engaging attractions you might find around the next curve. To get you started, we offer an entirely arbitrary selection of highlights on the road from Middletown to Staunton, for an easy day trip or a lingering weekend.

Route 11 Potato Chip Factory, Middletown

In the Valley, where fried isn't so much a culinary technique as a way of life, you can dive right into the spirit of things with a stop here.

In a 7,200-square-foot factory by the side of the road for which it is named, 40,000 pounds of potatoes are delivered, cleaned, peeled, chipped and fried to glorious, crisply textured uber-chipness at Route 11 every week. Fridays and Saturdays only, the factory is open for visitors; reward yourselves for your harrowing journey into the Land Without Starbucks by sampling from Route 11's line of (appropriately) 11 flavors—including the award-winning, incendiary Mama Zuma's Revenge, flavored with scorching habanero peppers—while watching through large viewing windows as the chips are made.

Sliced fresh only a moment before they are plunged into 300-degree oil, the chips spew from the slicer into a bathtub-size stainless steel vat, churning up an impressive froth of boiling oil and steam. As the potatoes cook, one of Route 11's small staff of 18 stirs them with a highly refined technical instrument otherwise known as a common garden leaf-rake. Skimmed from the hot oil and dumped on a tray, the chips are then hand-seasoned while still hot.

You can buy your chips fresh on the spot—and you should. Even the people who spend five days a week up to their elbows in chips can't resist a fresh Route 11.

"Our weakness is when they're still warm," admits Route 11 assistant plant manager and office manager Martie-Jo Hyde. "They have such a different flavor."

Route 11 will have been "chipping" 10 years come April, a possibility President Sarah Cohen never would have imagined when her family—owners of the District's eclectic Tabard Inn—sent her to the hinterlands to start the place. What did Cohen (who confesses "I'm a pretzel person myself") know about potato chips at the time?

"Nothing," she says with a laugh. "This was one of my parents' ideas. And I happened to be standing a little too still at the time when it came up."

Paper Treasures, New Market

In every reader's life there comes a moment when you think, "What I need now is a copy of Lapidary Journal."

Okay, perhaps not, but should the hankering hit you, head down Route 11 to Paper Treasures. With 10,000 square feet in a former Ford dealership, Paper Treasures is a vast collection of things written, printed and otherwise committed to paper. Here are pulp fiction paperbacks ("Love as hot as a blowtorch . . . crime as vicious as the jungle"), sheet music, old letters and postcards, original editions, vintage posters and maps, advertising tear sheets, comic books and a truly astonishing compendium of magazines: Hot Rod, Horological Times, Rail Fan & Railroad, Popular Science, the International Journal of American Linguistics and a June 23, 1962, issue of the Saturday Evening Post proclaiming the comeback of Rudy Vallee, to name the most infinitesimal of random samplings.

And then, of course, there are the books. Need a signed copy of Sartre or a circa 1840s copy of "The Citizens and Countryman's Experienced Farrier" authored by J. Markham, G. Jefferies and "experienced Indians"? Need a first-edition Dr. Seuss? Need a book for a buck? Find it here.

"There are about a quarter million items out and about a quarter million that haven't made it out," says owner Mike Lewis, and the really amazing thing is he seems to know where everything is. Among his finds over the years—a first edition of "Moby Dick" brought in by a woman who'd bought it at a local yard sale for 10 cents.

Says Ian (with a long "i") McNett, one of the small staff of book devotees to be found at Paper Treasures, "The first time I came in I wandered around with my jaw hanging open. The second time I asked for a job."

Shenville Creamery and Garden Market, Timberville

If driving Route 11 can give you the uncanny—or possibly uneasy—feeling that somewhere between Manassas and Middletown you managed to misplace the past 50 years, then a trip to Shenville Creamery and Garden Market may deliver you further into the time warp. At Shenville the milk still comes in glass bottles with the cream on top, a touch of nostalgia courtesy of a very modern dairy located right on the 200-acre farm of owners Leon and Ida Heatwole and their four children.

Launched as a commercial venture only a few years ago with a bumper crop of strawberries and a card table at the end of the driveway, Shenville now includes a 50-acre market garden yielding fresh produce from April (asparagus) through November (pumpkins), a bakery, bulk foods, ready-to-bake frozen-fruit pies or potpies, a deli, a gift shop, an ice-cream counter, picnic tables and, of course, the dairy itself, with an enclosed, windowed viewing area where posters explain how moo juice is made into milk and other things that go really, really well with pie.

The black-and-white Holsteins, who otherwise idle about the Heatwole fields doing whatever it is dairy cows do on their off hours, are milked at 4:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Some 3,000 pounds of milk a day are pasteurized and bottled or made into Shenville's ice cream, tangy yogurt, cottage cheese, cheese and butter. If you tried to get milk any fresher, the cow would probably slap you.

For an added attraction, you might happen to be there on one of those days when the freight train comes rumbling through and the engineer brings it to a halt and hops down to pick up some lunch.

Though not actually on Route 11, Shenville is only a few short miles out of the way (hang a right in New Market) and well worth the trip. The smartest way to get there is probably the way three visitors from Harrisonburg arrived—30 hilly miles by bicycle, with another 30 to get back home. Because when a sweetly smiling young woman offers up a sample of Shenville's doughnuts warm from the fryer, the only correct answer is yes.

Harper's Lawn Ornaments, Harrisonburg

Nothing really pulls a lawn together like a 10-foot fiberglass rooster.

You can find one, along with nearly everything else you could imagine for the thoroughly accented yard, at Harper's Lawn Ornaments, just north of Harrisonburg on Route 11.

Harper's has been in business in the same spot—essentially the back yard of founders Carroll and Betty Harper's home—for 40 years, specializing in a dizzying assortment of "cast stone" (otherwise known as concrete) garden decorations—including, but far from limited to: gnomes, frogs, rabbits, lions, geese, planters, angels, urns, benches, fountains, birdbaths, alligators, steppingstones, sea serpents, saints, space aliens, and more- and less-discreetly draped maidens. Not to mention additional selections of gazing balls, pink flamingos, ceramics, ironware and what seems to be an entire herd of fiberglass deer. And somehow, Harper's has managed to squeeze in a large display of complete water gardens as well. And the rooster. All on about three acres.
What Harper's has, more than anything else, is density.

Harper's was launched in 1962, when Carroll saw an ad in the back of a magazine for a catalogue of lawn ornament molds. "Turn concrete into gold," promised the ad, so Harper got a few molds and started making them in his basement, mixing the concrete with a stick.

"My grandfather said, 'This business will never make it,' " says Carroll and Betty's son, Dale.

Grandpa was wrong. Forty years later, Harper's cranks out enough concrete—now with a $30,000 machine instead of a stick—to make hundreds of thousands of ornaments annually, in nearly a thousand different designs, and three generations of Harpers, including Carroll and Betty, Dale and his brother, and Dale's son, are working in the business.

When they bought two acres from a neighbor back in 1975, "We wondered what we were going to do with all this land," Dale says. Now, he jokes, "next up is going to be a parking deck."

Virginia Quilt Museum, Harrisonburg

In the days of the underground railroad, slave-made quilts sometimes incorporated into their designs hidden messages to aid in the escape to freedom. In memoirs written late in her life, Lucinda Robinson Rice recalls throwing her quilts over the windows to protect her young children as the battle of New Market raged outside her door. Tradition held that a girl needed to make 13 quilts before she married; the thirteenth would be her wedding quilt.

These are a few of the surprisingly fascinating tidbits picked up on a visit to the Virginia Quilt Museum. If you think handmade quilts, however warm and comforting, are pretty tame stuff, about as action-packed as a cup of pudding, you will find instead that they are engrossing narratives in thread and fabric, dense with vivid historical details.

"You can read a quilt like a story," says museum Director-Curator Joan Knight. Quilts can reflect joy and whimsy. They can attest to the thrifty pragmatism of Depression-era women who quilted with colorful feed-sack fabrics. With their astonishingly intricate stitch work, they are a testament to industry and patience. And they can be powerfully poignant records of their time. Now on display at the museum are signed, six-inch squares from quilters throughout the state, reflecting their feelings about the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon; eventually these squares will be incorporated into several quilts in the museum's permanent collection.

Also just arrived is a quilt, circa 1872, from the hands of Mrs. Robert E. Lee, and, for decided contrast, a new show, running through June 3, called Together and Apart II, and featuring the contemporary work of members of the New Image group of quilters from the District and surrounding areas of Maryland and Virginia. With subjects as varied as UFOs, the art of van Gogh and that humble essential of the Martha Stewart armament (the domestic iron), the sheer range of this show should be enough to pull you in the door.

Comfort Food

These days there are plenty of restaurants in the Valley that have put all kinds of respectable haute in their cuisines, but if you wanted that you could stay home, couldn't you? For authentic old Valley eating on the Old Valley Pike, stop into any one of the unpretentious diners where the fundamental principle of southern cooking—that there is no food that cannot be improved by the addition of sugar, butter, some portion of the pig, or possibly all three—is put devotedly to work.

At Southern Kitchen in New Market, owned and operated by the same family in the same location since 1955, there are cured country hams for sale and the jukebox lets you wash down your lunch with such twanging laments as "She Went for Cigarettes" and "He Drinks Tequila."

On the menu are the familiar burgers, fries and sandwiches, but also mashed potatoes, stewed tomatoes, sweet corn muffins and peanut soup. However, it's the fried chicken Southern Kitchen is known for, and there were enough breasts and thighs coming out of the kitchen at midday to rival the red-carpet walk at the Oscars. For the finishing touch, I suppose you could try to resist the temptation heralded in the words "The pie is still warm from the oven," but why would you?

Assuming you could possibly feel hungry again, north of Harrisonburg you'll want to get in line early at the Blue Stone Inn. Open for dinners only (and only until 8:30 p.m.), the Inn is another longtime local favorite, a carnivore's kind of place with severed animal heads on the walls, and steaks and most particularly fresh seafood—there's a trout farm right in town—on the plates. Don't be fooled by the nondescript exterior; the crowd at the door says it all.

"The food is wonderful, and the people are wonderful, and it's always packed," says author Sutcliffe.

"It doesn't look like much, but when you get inside it's incredible food, great beer," agrees Harrisonburg resident Marshall Hammond, one of the trio of cyclists I met at the Shenville Creamery. Take his word on it—the only thing serious bicyclists are more serious about than bicycling is food.

Down the road in Staunton, Wright's Dairy Rite is one more venerable institution ("family owned since 1952"), an honest-to-goodness curb service drive-in. Pull up to your own "Servus Fone," order the grilled Dogzilla, the Monster Burger, brown beans and corn bread, malteds or hot fudge cake, and in a few minutes out comes a wholesome young person bearing a laden tray. While giving new dimensions to the term "to go," the hearse parked in front of me was not, I hope, an omen from my arteries.

Shorty's Diner, just east of Wright's on Route 250, is chronologically a young whippersnapper of a joint among this crowd, but its chrome-and-Formica look is pure "Happy Days," and the food is just like Mama used to make—assuming Mama was a short-order cook in the Eisenhower era. Blue plate specials, real meatloaf and mashed potatoes, baked mac-a-chee, onion rings, milkshakes and banana splits, and mile-high cakes made on the premises. Best of all, Shorty's complies with the Cardinal Rule of Diners: breakfast served all day.

Downtown Staunton

After Route 11 chips, Shenville, Southern Kitchen, Blue Stone, Wright's and Shorty's, what you need is a vigorous walk in the fresh air. The Historic Staunton (rhymes with "Scranton") walking tour is just the thing, rambling up and down steep hillsides through five districts listed in the National Register of Historic Places, all within a compact space of about one square mile. Most of the architecture dates from the late-19th and early-20th centuries, when apparently there was a whole lotta revival going on in Staunton: Jacobean, Greek, Renaissance, Gothic, Venetian and Romanesque revivals are all on display among the 60 structures on the walking-tour map, not to mention the prolific oeuvre of one T.J. Collins, architect. The best view in town is from the 1905 cast-iron footbridge over the train tracks at the restored railroad station.

If you're in need of restoration yourself, nearby on Byer's Street is BlueMountain Coffees, with serious coffee for the caffeine-head down in the Valley with a java jones. Blue Mountain is the kind of comfortable, low-key place where Mary Baldwin College students and local bluegrass players hang out reading improving literature, where you can pull up a chair and savor your Sumatra.

Strolling Staunton's historic district, you can take your pick of unimpeachably well-manicured gift shops, restaurants family and fancy, several cozy little inns and Woodrow Wilson's birthplace with his presidential Pierce-Arrow on 24-hour street-side display. When you're ready for a bracing bit of irreverence, stop into Zelma's on Beverly Street. "No Imagination, No Service," says the sign on the door. Named after owner Kimberly Pawlik's mother, Zelma's is mostly about vintage—kitsch, jewelry, LPs, odds and ends, and particularly clothes. Although anyone old enough to remember when there were still four Beatles may be alarmed to learn from Pawlik that the definition of "vintage" has now advanced all the way to the 1980s.

So what are you waiting for? Fire up the roadster. Get that triple latte to go. Right now, somewhere in the Valley, there's a pie with your name on it going into the oven.

Route 11 Potato Chip Factory—On Route 11 in Middletown. 800/294-7783. Web site: www.rt11.com
Paper Treasures—9595 Congress St. (Route 11), New Market. 540/740-3135. Web site: www.papertreasuresbooks.com
Shenville Creamery and Garden Market—16094 Evergreen Rd., Timberville. 877/600-7440. Web site: www.shenville.com
Harper's Lawn Ornaments—2670 North Valley Pike (Route 11), Harrisonburg. 540/434-8978. Web site: www.harperslawnornaments.com
Virginia Quilt Museum—301 South Main St. (Route 11), Harrisonburg. 540/433-3818. Web site: www.shenadven.com/Quilt/quiltmain.htm.
Southern Kitchen—9576 S. Congress St. (Route 11), New Market. 540/740-3514.
Blue Stone Inn—Route 11, Lacey Spring. 540/434-0535.
Shorty's Diner—1013 Richmond Rd. (Route 250), Staunton. 540/885-8861.
Wright's Dairy Rite—346 Greenville Ave. (Route 11), Staunton. 540/886-0435. Web site: www.dairy-rite.com
Blue Mountain Coffees—12-B Byer's St., Staunton. 540/886-4506. Web site: www.damnfine.net.
Zelma's—114 E. Beverly St., Staunton. 540/885-3966.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

Date posted: 03.07.04

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