art of adaptive reuse.....Ed Whelan’s vision

The Art of Adaptive Reuse

Ed Whelan’s Vision for the mill district

By Tom Conway

The Woolen Mill, like the Old Silk Mill, has renovated historic facilities to host weddings and events.

The Woolen Mill complex will eventually include an events space, apartments, and a brewery/restaurant. Plans for an education center and restaurant are in the works for the Embrey Power Station.

The Woolen Mill & Fredericksburg Shoe Company

When you walk into the Inn at the Old Silk Mill, which dates back to 1920, you are transported back in time. You notice the wide elegant staircase to the hotel's second floor, the ornate copper ceiling, and the elegantly trimmed front desk, which retains the old mail slots and key hooks of the 1920's. The inn, and the painstakingly renovated events venue behind it, a remnant of the 1889 silk mill that gives the inn its name, are the first phase in an extensive project being undertaken by local developer Ed Whelan. "We travelled to a number of places with revitalized industrial districts, like Asheville, North Carolina, and Shockhoe Bottom in Richmond. The Mill District here as a microcosm of that. We can take these old buildings and make them into something. We want this to be something for everybody."

His vision involves a lot of much needed development along Caroline and Princess Anne streets near the canal path. In addition to the Old Silk Mill, Whelan also owns the buildings most recently used by the Dowling Sign Company, which date to 1901 and originally were part of a woolen mill, at times housing a pants factory and the Fredericksburg Shoe Company. There, he has already constructed another lovingly renovated events venue, Woolen Mill, complete with a preserved freight elevator powered by a handpulled rope and pulley.

"We're doing our best to preserve everything we can," says his partner Anna Sanborn. "We kept doors, windows, lighting fixtures, a lot of the original floors, and even the stalls inside the bathrooms." In addition to the event space, his plans for the complex include several apartments with river views and a large brew pub and restaurant fronting on Princess Anne.

On the other side of the canal path, he owns the 1917 grain tower used by the Germania Mill Company and several nearby buildings fronting Princess Anne Street, where he plans to build condominiums and retail space. The iconic 1901 Embrey Power Plant also belongs to Whelan. There, tentative plans call for a restaurant and an education center. "We're working on how we can get people out on the river to learn about the ecology, its history, and how it's served this town." And it has served the town well. Starting in the 1850's, water diverted from the Rappahannock Canal and the rapids above town fed textile and grain mills from the Old Silk Mill at Princess Anne and Herndon streets all the way through Old Mill Park to the Falmouth B r i d g e . Thousands of city residents over more than 100 years worked in those mills m a k i n g products sold all over the country. The area was also home to a succession of hydro-electric power plants which illuminated the town as far back as 1887. But fire, time, and changing technologies took their toll on those industries. The buildings that housed them disappeared. Today, only a handful remain, a decaying reminder of a bygone era doomed to be lost to history. Unless they are somehow rejuvenated. "I'd love to get the power plant operating," says Whelan. "The feed from the canal is shut off, but it's possible we can generate enough juice to get the street lights to work. I can just see these streets lit up and people waving to each other from the rooftops and everyone enjoying this area again. That would be incredible." Tom Conway is an English teacher and writer who recently moved back to

Fredericksburg after years of exile in Northern Virginia photos by Tom Conway