Colonial Williamsburg
Is a Hot Retirement Spot

When my husband and I were embarking on a retirement move from Westport, Conn., a year ago, the mover mentioned casually that he was then working with five other clients in our area who were headed for the same destination as we were: Williamsburg, Virginia.

Now, if he had said he was packing a clutch of Connecticut retirees off to Palm Springs or Sarasota, I wouldn't have blinked. But Williamsburg? This quaint vestige of colonial America, tucked on the peninsula between Richmond and Virginia Beach, boasts neither drop-dead scenic vistas, powdery sand beaches or tropical winter climes.

Nonetheless, retirees are flocking here, many of them settling in one of the area's five luxury golf communities, development of which began in the mid-1970s and has accelerated in recent years. As much as anything, these nationally marketed resort communities have put Williamsburg on the map as a newly popular retirement haven. Another oft-cited factor is its strategic location: close enough -- but not too close -- to friends and family, and within a day's drive of half the U.S. population.

Because the boom is so recent, 1990 census numbers don't accurately reflect the influx of older residents. But local real-estate agents have been doing a brisk business in retirement housing. John Enright of Prudential McCardle Realty observes that he's worked with some retired couples who have pulled up stakes in Florida to relocate here. "They say Florida is too far away from their grandchildren," he says. Of his out-of-state clients in the past year and a half, 68% were retired and an additional 6% were scouting properties to retire to in a few years.

'A Place in Between'

John May retired here from Connecticut in 1985, well in advance of the crowds. If he'd had unlimited funds, he says his ideal would have been to have a winter home in Florida and a summer home in Maine. "Instead, I picked a place in between," he says.

Golf definitely figured in that choice. In his 31-year career as a writer and editor at Golf Digest magazine, Mr. May had played and critiqued many of the nation's best courses and was ideally suited to pick among them. He ultimately chose Kingsmill on the James, Anheuser-Busch Cos.' 2,900-acre residential and resort community in Williamsburg featuring a trio of championship 18-hole courses. Its River Course is the site of the Michelob Championship at Kingsmill on the PGA tour.

He bought his two-bedroom cluster home early enough to avoid the upfront initiation fees that Kingsmill residents currently pay to use sports facilities (one-time refundable deposits range from $2,000 to $25,000). Mr. May's annual $2,610 dues for a top-of-the-line single membership give him unlimited access to golf, tennis and the fitness club; he intersperses twice-weekly rounds of golf with a three-times-a-week tennis game.

But Williamsburg residents needn't live in a golf resort to play: Kingsmill, like most golf communities here, opens its courses to the public. All told, there are more than a dozen 18-hole public courses in the area.

Our own decision to relocate in Williamsburg had nothing to do with golf. First and foremost, we had family here. Beyond that, it was enticingly affordable, after the tax and real-estate stratospheres of the Northeast. For a third of the selling price of our Westport home, we found a house here with a smaller yard but more square footage in a community with a marina, lake, pool and tennis courts.

Williamsburg's small-town ambiance belies its convenient location -- 150 miles south of Washington, D.C., an hour to Atlantic beaches and less than three hours to the Blue Ridge Mountains. As boat owners, we liked the town's proximity to the sport-fishing waters of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, the James and York rivers.

Back to College

The clincher, however, was learning that residents age 60 and older can audit three courses a semester free of charge at the College of William & Mary. The ivied campus of this second-oldest institution of higher learning in America dominates downtown along with Colonial Williamsburg, the 173-acre restoration of 18th-century American life that attracts roughly a million visitors a year.

While most state universities offer similar privileges to older adults, getting access to a small (5,550 undergraduates) institution of William & Mary's caliber seemed to us a rarity. In addition to auditing, 1,000 older Williamsburg residents belong to the Christopher Wren Society, an organization that offers short courses on everything from the Central Intelligence Agency to opera in collaboration with the college.

It is safe to say that no Williamsburg resident has more adroitly exploited the town's educational opportunities than 80-year-old Evelyn Becker, who moved here from Bronxville, N.Y., in 1972 after the death of her husband.

For 17 years, she has audited two college courses a semester, in subjects as diverse as anthropology and medieval art to plate tectonics and ornithology. One son and a granddaughter attended the college with her; theirs is said to be the first family to have three generations simultaneously enrolled.

Both William & Mary and Colonial Williamsburg are hubs of a vibrant local cultural scene, including three major art museums, libraries, theater, concerts, films and academic symposia on almost a nightly basis. Williamsburg residents can obtain free passes to Colonial Williamsburg and its continually changing lineup of events. If one is willing to venture to Richmond or Norfolk -- each less than an hour on traffic-clogged I-64 -- the cultural offerings expand exponentially: The Virginia Opera, for example, stages productions in both cities, as does the Virginia Symphony.

So far, we've had many happy surprises. The friendliness of the people can't be overstated -- this really is a place where newcomers are welcomed with plates of cookies, and where neighbors come to their front porches to greet passersby. The peaceful beauty of the Colonial National Parkway has been another unexpected pleasure. This 23-mile roadway connecting the so-called "Historic Triangle" of Yorktown, Williamsburg and Jamestown offers frequent glimpses of osprey, bald eagles and great blue herons.

Snowbound

Disappointments have been few, and might be summarized as the Weather Problem and the Food Factor. Williamsburg promotes its mild, four-season climate, and though winters are sunnier than up North, we didn't expect last January's blizzard that dropped 12 inches of snow and left our street unplowed for nearly a week. ("This year was unusual" is the natives' constant refrain in any discussion of local weather.) The long, sticky summers can be punctuated by hurricanes. We moved in during back-to-back storms: first Dennis, then Floyd. ("Unusual," the locals said.)

Food is the other pet peeve. Williamsburg has a wealth of restaurants; it's just that you have to really hunt for standouts, studiously avoiding the tourist-trough chain eateries lining Richmond Road, the town's main commercial thoroughfare.

In this coastal region, fresh, simply cooked seafood is hard to come by, as is the chewy rustic bread we took for granted back in Connecticut. A few new restaurants and gourmet groceries are helping to rectify this gap. Still, with all due respect to a feisty local bumper sticker that proclaims: "We don't care how they do it up North," I submit that as a culinary stronghold, Williamsburg can't hold a candle to New Orleans, Charleston S.C. -- or even nearby Newport News.

Quibbles aside, it would be hard to find an area more attractive to amateur historians than Williamsburg, Yorktown -- where the British surrendered to George Washington's Continental Army in 1781, ending the Revolution -- and Jamestown, the site of the first permanent English settlement in North America. In addition, within a short drive are numerous battlefields and historic towns commemorating the bloody campaigns that raged up and down the peninsula during the Civil War.

Colonial Williamsburg alone has 1,000 volunteers, mostly retired, serving as museum guides, gardeners, archaeological researchers, and in myriad other ways.

Jack Tier, a retired U.S. Army colonel, has found a second career transmitting Powhatan Indian lore to legions of schoolchildren who visit the living history museum at Jamestown Settlement, which celebrates its 400th anniversary in 2007. Bare-chested, in a costume of buckskin leggings and apron that he made himself, he demonstrates how to flake stone arrowheads and smooth rocks into cudgels like those once used against the English settlers.

Col. Tier had commanded the 8th Transportation Brigade at nearby Fort Eustis, Va., when he retired at 47 to care for his aging parents. He and his wife Bert found a 4,200-square-foot home in Williamsburg, a compromise between his wish to live in the country and his wife's interest in more urban attractions.

Growth Begins

Twenty-five years ago, there was no particular reason to migrate to Williamsburg, then still a sleepy college town with tourists. When Anheuser-Busch built its big brewery and Busch Gardens theme park here, it also began development of Kingsmill, which opened in 1974. Even then, Williamsburg proper had little vacant land, so Kingsmill rose in the woodlands of adjoining James City County, where other big developers soon followed. The tax base rose, schools improved, and doctors and other professionals arrived, creating a critical mass of services and shopping that began to attract increasing numbers of out-of-staters.

Now, like most other relatively unspoiled places, the Williamsburg area is agonizing over the rapid pace of growth and how to preserve its still-pristine quality of life. James City County's population rose 32% in the past decade to 46,000, and new developments are filling up twice as fast as projected.

While the healthy economy and rising real-estate valuations have held property taxes steady for the past four years, the influx of new residents is straining water supplies, roads, schools and public services. Tourism, flat for the past two years, isn't providing sufficient new tax revenue to offset needed outlays -- raising concern about future tax increases.

The specter of northern Virginia -- with its traffic, pollution and crowding -- looms large as an object lesson here. But regional planning for future growth is complicated by the fact that Williamsburg sits within three separate -- and often conflicting -- jurisdictions: the city itself, plus York and James City counties.

Housing Bargains

Because most retired residents come from urban areas of the Mid-Atlantic or Northeast, Williamsburg's housing costs still represent a bargain. The average selling price of a single-family home is now $211,157, but new estate properties or luxury townhouses on the water can fetch $1 million and up. Though many retirees have settled in developments with country-club amenities, it's worth noting that both city and county offer spectacular public recreational facilities at modest cost. Residents 55 and older pay just $125 a year for access to the James City/Williamsburg Community Center's facilities, including a 25-meter pool, sauna, whirlpool, track, fitness machines and even a pottery studio.

Williamsburg is attractive to all ages -- meaning that children and grandchildren rarely need prodding to visit. Some, in fact, decide to put down roots here, too. Before retirement, Ellen and John Bellio had lived just a mile from their daughter, son-in-law and only grandchild in Westchester County, N.Y. So when the blizzards of 1995 persuaded them it was time to head south, the Bellios' daughter, Elaine, a registered nurse, "went exploring" with them -- to the Carolinas and Virginia.

"We backed into Williamsburg," says Mrs. Bellio, 65. She and her husband, 67, had already rejected Florida, which Mrs. Bellio dismisses as "God's waiting room." They wanted the youthful stimulus of a college town, but disliked Chapel Hill's rowdy bar scene. "It looked like Times Square," she sniffs.

In Williamsburg, she says, their daughter "fell in love with Ford's Colony," a golf community of custom homes, ponds and hiking trails, and she herself "fell back in love with Williamsburg," which they had visited previously as tourists. Both families wound up building homes in Ford's Colony; the Bellios arrived in the fall of 1998; their daughter and her family moved in this summer.

The Bellios -- she is a former comptroller for a construction company; he was a computer specialist at a Manhattan insurance company -- have made a smooth transition. She applauds the "Southern gentleness" of the locals, and says they've made a number of fast friendships. "This place is alive -- you don't come here to vegetate," she adds. "It's like a perpetual vacation."

The Bellios, too, grumble good-naturedly about the restaurants, the gates on their community, and last winter's blizzard. But Mrs. Bellio shrugs off these trifles, saying, "We didn't move to Paradise -- we moved to Virginia."

Settlers Return

Williamsburg population: 12,200

Greater Williamsburg population: 58,300 (includes city of Williamsburg, plus Upper York and James City Counties)

Average annual rainfall: 45 inches

Average low temperature: January: 27 degrees F.

Average high temperature: August, 87 degrees

Average annual snowfall: 7.6 inches

Average relative humidity: 70%

Average home price: $211,157

State income tax: Graduated, from 2% on the first $3,000 of taxable income to 5.75% on the amount above $17,000; $800 personal exemption for residents age 65 or older.

Residential property tax: 54 cents per $100 assessed value in Williamsburg; 87 cents in James City County; 86 cents in York.

Sales tax: 4.5%

Miles of coastal shoreline: York and James City Counties, 457

Number of original 18th-century buildings: In Williamsburg, 88

Sources: City of Williamsburg, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, James City and York County

Ms. Graham is a writer in Williamsburg.

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