FEATURES DECEMBER 2009

Baritone on the Roof

It took a miniscule initial investment—plus painstaking labor and incredible creativity—for musician and balladeer Cliff Williams to turn the abandoned 1760 Lightwood Plantation home into a beautifully restored rental property.

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Bookmark and Share By Phyllis Speidell; Photos by John H. Sheally, II


Baritone Cliff Williams performed on international opera stages, worked with conductor Leonard Bernstein and sang as Mercutio, with tenor Jose Carreras as Romeo, in a Barcelona opera house run of Romeo and Juliet.

But now Williams, a balladeer in Colonial Williamsburg, has turned his attention from the limelight to Lightwood, a circa 1760 plantation in Surry. Thirty years ago the Williamsburg resident lost his heart to the historic home he found abandoned in a corner of Surry County. He was in his mid 20s, single, with a degree in vocal music from Indiana University and a tan Ford Pinto—and not much else—to his name.

“I bought the house for $1000,” Williams says. “It was in rough shape.”

He painstakingly dismantled the old house, marked each piece with a code and moved the structure, board by board, in the Pinto and a borrowed farm truck, to a new site 12 miles away. The 70-acre property, a couple miles from the Jamestown ferry piers in Surry, is a deeply wooded section of the land Chief Powhatan gave to Pocahontas and John Rolfe as a wedding gift.

As the relocation progressed Williams grew accustomed to people referring to his battered Pinto as a rolling dumpster. The restoration project was the death of the Pinto but the birth of his lifelong passion.

Over the next 20 years he reconstructed the vintage, white clapboard five-bedroom house, restoring its original grace by working from clues he unearthed in the mountain of materials he’d reclaimed, years of research and a large measure of creativity.

An intact half round baluster yielded enough information to model new full balusters for the house’s staircase.

“It’s a vernacular grand staircase, with all the elements like turns and curves, but in miniature,” he says.

The back of the kitchen, originally built on a foundation of cypress stumps, had fallen in, perhaps after a fire. Williams rebuilt it with an open beam ceiling and a small balcony overlooking the room from the second floor loft.

He stripped wallboard and wall paper from the dining room and discovered solid wood beams on the ceiling, inspiring him to restore the room in the style of the main dining room at Chowning’s Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg.

Inspired by what he had seen in Europe, Williams admits there’s also a strong Williamsburg influence throughout the house.

“On my breaks from performing, I’d walk with a camera, sketchbook and measuring tape, looking at the architectural elements around me,” he says.

He did all the restoration work, hands on, from the roof to the interior faux finishes.

“It helps to not know what you’re getting into,” he says.

Until 1986 he continued his operatic career from Sante Fe to Miami, Manitoba, Spain and Austria, all the while continuing to work on the house and perform in full colonial garb as a balladeer and musician in Williamsburg.

“But you can’t do opera part time,” he says.

Does he miss the larger stage, we wondered, as we watched tourists clad in T-shirts and Crocs sandals thrust stuffed animals at his waistcoated chest outside a Colonial Williamsburg tavern and order him to smile for photos with the fuzzy critters.

It wasn’t his most inglorious moment.

That honor would have to go, he says, to the appearance he made years ago to promote a performance of Faust. The opera company publicity people staged the promotion in the lingerie department of a local department store. There, Williams, dressed in tights as Mephistopheles, was accompanied by his vocal coach, Will Crutchfield, who later was a New York Times music critic.

“Adolescent boys were whistling at me as we went by,” he says. “And I could hear Will sputtering with suppressed laughter at the piano.”

Too flustered to hit the high notes of his planned repertoire, Williams struggled through less familiar arias in lower ranges, making up his own version of the French and Italian lyrics.

“You just compartmentalize,” he says. “It’s a reality check.”

Williams grew up the lone musician in a military family, living in Northern Virginia and Honolulu. He idolized Robert Merrell, Gordon MacRae, John Raitt and the other big voices of the era but waited until his parents and two brothers were out of the house before he sang. So the family was surprised when he announced he was competing in the high school talent show—and stunned when his rendition of “Climb Every Mountain” won first place.

But he still thought he’d have a career in some kind of building, an interest all three brothers shared, until he went to college and serious music won out.

Now he strolls the streets and taverns of Colonial Williamsburg with his Spanish guitar and his recorder, his blue eyes shining as he introduces tourists to the top hits of 300 to 400 years ago.

“We have a lot of excellent musicians here but Cliff is the best,” says Seth Farrell, food and beverage manager for the Colonial Williamsburg Company.

Williams was living in his plantation house when he met Joy, a British historian who specializes in the 17th century. The couple married on Lightwood’s front porch 20 years ago and lived there until moving to Williamsburg six years ago with their two young sons. Then they transformed the plantation house into a vacation rental home.

Joy was an 18-year-old student when she first saw Lightwood in October 1982. At the time she was dating a mutual friend who occasionally helped Williams on the house.

“Cliff had finished the kitchen, dining room and upstairs bedroom and was living there as he worked on it,” she says. “It was very rough, very, very rough—barely habitable to put it mildly—but he loved it and loved what he was doing.”

She visited Lightwood often, even when she was no longer dating the friend. Williams amazed her as much as the house did.

“He had no training in all this but he can turn his hand to so many different things” she says. “He’d find books about how to do plumbing, how to lay bricks.”

By the time the couple married in 1989, she too had laid bricks and stripped paint.

“We worked day by day and inch by inch as we had the time and the money,” Joy says. “When we lived there it was habitable but not as comfortable as it is now.”

“Over the years Joy’s influence has helped turn Lightwood from a work in progress to a warm, welcoming and elegant home,” Williams says.

The house was originally built by the Wall family on land patented to a Wall in Surry about 1700.

“I don’t know much about them but apparently they were very patriotic and named one son Patrick Henry Wall,” Williams says.

The Maynard family bought the house in 1857 not long before Williams’ great grandfather fought for the Federal forces at Gettysburg.

Lightwood is now fully restored and furnished with a mix of antiques and reproductions including rope beds and a harpsichord hand crafted by noted luthier Peter Redstone of Claremont. A few contemporary touches including a Jacuzzi tub and an up-to-date kitchen offer guests modern amenities.

“There’s nothing like staying in an authentic 18th-century house when you’re visiting 18th-century historic sites,” Williams says. “There are only a handful of true colonials available in Virginia to rent as a whole house.”

The notes in Lightwood’s guest book agree. One of his most enthusiastic guests was a Brit who is the curator of arms at the Tower of London. Another wrote in Chinese, and Williams likes to assume that the comment is equally complimentary.

But a fairly full reservation list doesn’t imply the project is done.

“I want people to have the feeling of a colonial welcome from the time they drive in,” he says.

A long winding lane leads to the house and gardens in the middle of a beech grove. The English garden behind the house is planted with herbs and cutting flowers, none more modern than 1859. Williams built the garden fountain himself, from antique millstones and Belgian ballast stones, and continues to focus his attention on the outbuildings and landscaping.

“There’s no end in sight,” he says. “I’m still a musician, but my ambitions are in the house now.”

At least until he and Joy are ready for their next dream—moving to the south of France and restoring an old French manor house in Provence.

“But not,” Joy says, “quite the fixer-upper that Lightwood was.”

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