Brewery site a stone’s throw from history hotspots

How things change in a year. The announcement of Hardywood Park Craft Brewery’s $28 million expansion in Goochland County this week made me think back to this time last year, when Stone had yet to announce that Richmond would be the site for its own expansion. I thought I’d share this column I wrote for the Richmond Times-Dispatch while I was doing the regular gig to lend a bit of perspective to RVA’s place in beer history. We live in a golden era for brewing, but these latest developments are links in a chain extending back centuries.

Published Aug. 13, 2014

If Stone Brewing Co. comes to Richmond, it will mark a new chapter in RVA history, particularly for beer lovers.

Serendipitously, there’s history aplenty — beer history — already serving as bookends to the brewery’s proposed site. A more fitting use of the land can hardly be imagined, for it would link the founding of our city — and our nation’s greatest struggle — to the indelible tale of beer, a story that connects us to the dawn of civilization.

The California-based brewery is eyeing a location on 12.5 acres just east of downtown Richmond. Williamsburg Avenue and Nicholson Street serve as boundaries, with Gillies Creek Park just across the way.

If Stone does indeed build there, folks could one day enjoy a pint of Arrogant Bastard Ale (I’m drinking one as I write this) and savor what I will call the Tale of Two Hills. By looking east from the Stone beer garden, they could view Fulton Hill rising above the houses along Williamsburg Road. If they dialed back their vision to 1607, they would see a Powhatan village there; and if they fine-tuned that vision to a particular day in late May, they would see a party of Englishmen arriving in a boat, just days after landing at Jamestown.

The group included captains John Smith and Christopher Newport. Their mission was to find a route to the South Sea, where untold riches awaited. Among their provisions — according to Gabriel Archer, who chronicled the trip — were “beere, Aquavitae [brandy] and sack [wine].” These libations were intended to break the ice between the visitors and the Powhatans, for relations were ticklish at best.

So they had a party. Seriously. With dancing and all kinds of carrying on. They partied a little too hard, though, for the combination of different drinks left Parahunt, son of the powerful Chief Powhatan, feeling “very sick,” according to Archer. Newport assured Parahunt he would feel better after sleeping it off. When this proved true, Newport achieved status as a medicine man and was bombarded with questions about other maladies.

On the day after the party — May 24, 1607, according to a monument by the city’s Canal Walk — the Englishmen proceeded to the falls of the James River and planted a cross in honor of King James I.

There’s more to the story than I can tell here. Suffice it to say that beer was part of Richmond’s founding, and it was a force for good.

Now, let’s return to that beer garden we hope Stone will build. By looking over the other shoulder, folks might spy Chimborazo Hill and the National Park Service site dedicated to the hospital that stood there during the Civil War. Chimborazo Hospital was one of the largest, most sophisticated and most efficient facilities of its kind in the Confederacy. Over the course of 3½ years, it treated roughly 75,000 sick and wounded people, more than any other hospital, North or South.

A brewery had been built nearby. Details are sketchy, but according to the research I’ve done for my upcoming book (subtle product placement), a man named John Goodman established a lager brewery in 1859. Accounts identify its location as Rocketts, which extended west of today’s Rocketts Landing.

Lager was new to Richmond in those days, and Goodman’s brews were part of a taste sensation. An account in The Richmond Dispatch of Jan. 30, 1860, raved about “the superiority of the beer over that of any other brewery known to the imbibers of that peculiar beverage.”

As the hospital came into use, the nearby brewery, capable of producing 400 kegs at a time, had a medical application, for “alcohol in various forms probably was the most popular drug of the times,” according to one news account. The brewery did not survive, and cellars used to the store the beer were abandoned and sealed.

Now, regarding that potential beer garden. I know profits, growth and product weigh more heavily than history in the formula for business success. But considering that Richmond has a thriving beer presence — a dozen breweries pouring in the extended metro area — and considering the potential for accessing a centrally located market, wouldn’t it be nice to think of the Stone folks looking at Richmond and feeling the pull of destiny as part of beer’s past as well as its future?

To that end, there’s no place like Richmond, just as there’s no place like Stone.