Farewell To The Rice Pit

Well, another piece of my childhood gone.

About a gazillion years ago, way back in the nascent hippie days (mid-'Sixties), long before VCRs and DVD players, before video games and XBoxes and Wii, before iPods and iPhones and cable and Tivo, even before cell phones and personal computers and the Intarweb, there was a magic era known as the Golden Age of Hobbies.

Okay, it wasn't magic and it wasn't golden. As pre-sexualized adolescents (remember: this was loooong ago--sex hadn't been invented and dinosaurs ruled the earth along with Top 40 AM radio) we were restless, irritable, discontented, and bored. We had to fill our time with something, so many of us turned to hobbies--amateur radio, model rocketry, relic hunting, coin collecting, stamp collecting, rock collecting, trading card collecting, Little League, Boy Scouts, comic books, 4H, anything to fill the time before we could get down to the serious business of driving cars, drinking beer, dating, and getting into real trouble.

I collected fossils.

Oh, geez, did I collect fossils, Virginia having a slew of nice collecting localities at the time; unfortunately, my mother was not particularly thrilled at the idea of her basement/rec room accumulating a bunch of dirty rocks. She didn't discourage my interests, exactly, but she made it clear that prehistoric sea shells, ancient bones, and small mounds of shark teeth were not part of her decorating scheme. Nor were trips to, let's say, rustic, out-of-the-way places involving dirt, mud, stagnant water, and marginal sanitary conveniences her idea of a way to spend the weekend

But with the help of my friend Rob and his father I was able to collect. In Highland County, in Westmoreland State Park, at Carter's Grove Plantation, and, most especially, in the Rice Pit in Hampton, VA, I managed to dredge up enough fossils to keep my mother in a tizzy for months.

Now, about the Rice Pit--for a science-mad kid who didn't get out much except on parental expeditions to visit elderly relatives, the Rice Pit was damn near close to Nirvana! Here was a Great! Big! Deep! Muddy! Sandy! pit chock full o' neat stuff to collect and treasure, assuming, of course, that marine specimens from the Miocene epoch dieseled your innards. No one cared how dirty we got--getting dirty was part of the fun--and no adults hovered over us monitoring our every move. They were there, but remained in the background. Plus, there was a vicarious thrill, an element of danger, for lurking in the bottom of the pit, they said, were pools of quicksand. The bottom was off-limits and that was about the only rule of the site.

Can you tell this is one of my fondest childhood memories?

I don't know what got me to thinking about the Rice Pit recently, but I had been and when I launched a Google search I found this:

Whatever happened to ... Hampton fossil pit that drew history hunters?

The Virginian-Pilot
© June 25, 2007

HAMPTON

For a couple of decades, kids came from schools throughout Hampton Roads to dig for history in a giant hole in the ground.

The Kenneth E. Rice Memorial Museum and Fossil Pit closed about 1989 when owner Madeline Rice decided she was too old and arthritic to keep it going.

Soon, water filled the 70-foot-deep hole, closing the circle on what the Smithsonian Institution once declared one of the richer fossil finds in the world.

The trove was discovered when businessman William Macon Rice was digging up fill dirt in his backyard borrow pit for the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel and exposed the complete skeleton of a 60-foot-long whale.

Rice called the Smithsonian, and three scientists showed up the next day. It took them a couple of weeks to exhume the 20-million-year-old fossil, which they took back to the museum.

Other scientists followed and were astounded by the number of marine fossils in the small area, thought to have been a sub aquatic depression that collected whatever fell to the bottom during the millions of years the area was beneath 100 feet of ocean.

The family became entranced by the pit, learning the Latin names and history of the things paleontologists turned up.

Their then-8-year-old son, Kenny, spent most of his spare time in the hole, becoming a self-educated fossil expert. He'd dig them up and trade with archeologists for petrified wood, gems and other fossils.

When he was 14, he was driving a tractor to the pit when the machine rolled over the edge and killed him. His father was standing nearby but couldn't save the boy.

Six months later, on Jan. 1, 1967, William Rice opened the fossil museum and pit in honor of his son.

He charged the public a small fee to take their chance at digging up fossils and allowed them to keep whatever they found.

Soon schools brought students on field trips to the pit and museum. Rice usually was right beside them, telling the children the story behind the fossilized seashells or fish bones they found.

William Rice died of a heart attack in 1979, and his wife nearly shut down the pit. She operated it alone for another decade, leading schoolchildren through the museum, then taking them down to the dig.

When she couldn't maintain the pit, she unsuccessfully tried to get the city of Hampton to take it over. Eventually, it filled with water.

She died in 2000, and two years ago, her son William sold the pit, museum and surrounding land to the Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, which intends to expand its facility, according to Linda Robinson, principal of the church's school.

"We're going to put a family life center there and are developing plans to expand our playground," she said.

The pit will be left as a lake, she said, a place to attract deer and geese and ducks instead of history hunters.

When Robinson first came to teach at the school, she said, she went with children into the pit as they dug for fossils. Those children, now adults, often return and ask her about the pit, she said.

She hopes some day to be able to direct them to a display that recounts the pit's past. The Rice family gave the church the fossils that were in the museum, she said, and Gloria Dei intends to build an exhibit for them in one of the new facilities.

Eventually the pit filled with water. Gloria Dei Lutheran Church bought the land in 2005.
Tony Germanotta | The Virginian-Pilot

Gone. There, but no longer accessible. At least it wasn't filled and turned into a strip mall; judging from the photo, the area is now quite attractive.

But it's not the same.