Peninsula In Passage

Robert T. Williams After serving as City Manager of Portsmouth for six years (1975 to 1981) and Newport News (1981 to 1986) Robert T. Williams was primed to create a new “city” in North Suffolk. During the 1970s oil embargo, Chicago Bridge and Iron bought up farmland there with the idea of developing an oil refinery but lost interest in the project when the embargo ended a few years later. They hired Goodman-Segar-Hogan to find an alternate use for the land. Williams resigned from Newport News in 1986 to take on the job of creating a master plan and gaining rezoning for the GSH project proposal. That done, in January, 1988, he accepted an offer from the Jorman Group, representing Chicago Bridge and Iron, to head the almost 3000 acre development he had planned. Williams was a visionary, much as was whoever built a fort in the early 1600s, about a mile off the shoreline, deep into the site of the new planned community. The previously undocumented remains of the fort, excavated in the late 1980s, offered no clear picture of who sheltered there although some speculate that it was a contingent of settlers escaping hard times in Jamestown or perhaps a man named John Wilkins who had received a king’s grant in 1636 and may have sent servants to tenant the land. Williams is a realist and knows that even visionaries need luck - and perseverance. After the City of Suffolk rezoned the former farmland in 1987, Williams planned to launch the new community about the same time as the Monitor Merrimac Memorial Bridge Tunnel was projected to open in 1990. When an economic downturn struck in the late 1980s,Williams propped up the fledgling project by selling dirt out of borrow pits on the property to help build the new 664 highway and he waited. Then the bridge-tunnel ran

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