15 years of Windsor Castle Park: Designer Lawrence Pitt recalls early days of Luter-funded nature preserve
Published 2:38 pm Tuesday, June 3, 2025
Lawrence Pitt stands on a scenic overlook at Cypress Creek in Windsor Castle Park. (Photos by Stephen Faleski | The Smithfield Times)
A footbridge connects Windsor Castle Park to an entrance on South Church Street by the Smithfield Station hotel and restaurant.
Windsor Castle Park is named for the 18th century Windsor Castle manor house that was the home of Smithfield founder Arthur Smith IV.
A Northern Diamond-Backed Terrapin crawls near a section of trail, possibly looking for nesting sites. Late May is their nesting season.
A man and a woman cast lines from the park’s fishing pier at Cypress Creek.
The kayak launch, one of Windsor Castle Park’s most popular attractions, was one of Pitt’s ideas.
May 22 marked 15 years since the grand opening of Windsor Castle Park, which owes its presence in the heart of Smithfield’s historic district primarily to two men.
The first and most well known is former Smithfield Foods Chairman Joseph Luter III, who gave $5 million to the town to purchase the 208-acre 18th century homestead of Smithfield founder Arthur Smith IV.
The second is Luter’s project manager, Lawrence Pitt, who recently met with the Times for an interview on his role in bringing Luter’s brainchild to fruition.
Pitt said he first met Luter several years before being hired as project manager when he was serving on the board of one of Luter’s other philanthropic efforts.
“He was just as nice a guy as you can be. … He calls me by name; I don’t know how he knew,” Pitt said.
Luter asked Pitt to help him with a home renovation project and “from there, we became real good friends,” Pitt said.
Luter had retired as Foods’ president and CEO in 2006 but was still serving as the company’s board chairman when he approached Pitt, a phone company retiree, in early 2009 and asked that they meet for lunch at the Smithfield Station restaurant.
“He said, ‘Come on, I want to show you something I want to do,’” Pitt said, and, after lunch, they found themselves wandering through the woods by the park’s South Church Street entrance.
“He says, ‘I want to make a park here,’” Pitt said.
At the time, the land was still owned by Newport News developer Lewis McMurran, who in 2004 had proposed building a 445-home development dubbed “Villages at Windsor Castle.”
“He said, ‘I’ll take care of it,’” Pitt recalled. “… In less than a week he called me and said go ahead and start digging.”
It’s something Pitt has always admired about Luter.
“When he wants to do something, he gets his way,” said Pitt, who credits Luter with coming up with the idea and getting the project started.
“We look at the park and call it good,” the Rev. Will Montgomery, pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in 2010, was quoted in the Times as having remarked at the park’s dedication ceremony that year, alluding to a passage in the Bible describing the creation of the world.
While Windsor Castle Park took longer than six days to build, Pitt was able to finish it in just over a year by following an aggressive construction schedule. He began by crawling through foliage to mark the desired path of the walking trail with wooden stakes, designing its shape to require clearing only shrubbery and leave large trees where they stood. There’s one point where the walking trail splits to go around a tree.
“We wanted it to stay as natural as it could possibly be,” Pitt said.
He recalls that even before the trails were graded and paved, people began walking them, following the stakes.
Pitt retained Todd Bryant, owner of Bryant’s Excavation, to do the clearing and grading of the nearly four-mile walking trail that spans the park’s perimeter, with one condition.
“I said if I give you the job I want you on the job until we finish,” Pitt said.
Bryant, who’d worked with Pitt before, agreed to Pitt’s terms and by April 2009 Pitt had drawn up a schedule that called for the trail to be completed by Sept. 5 of that year.
The idea for a kayak and canoe rental and launch pier located a half-mile south of the South Church Street entrance at a clearing overlooking Cypress Creek, Pitt said, was one of his ideas, though he pitched to Luter and received approval.
Pitt oversaw the demolition of a house on Mason Street to make room for the park’s main entrance, where a brick wall, pavers and historic-style street lamps now stand, and arranged for an archeological study to search for the grave of Arthur Smith and evidence of Native American inhabitation. Two headstones, one of which is Smith’s, were found in the tree line near the waterfront and are now surrounded by a wrought iron fence bordering a section of trail.
Pitt also served as Luter’s spokesman through the permitting process, which entailed obtaining permissions from Smithfield’s Town Council, Isle of Wight County’s Wetlands Board and the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.
Hodges & Hodges Marine built the original piers and footbridges, which in 2024 were rebuilt by Athens Building Corp.
The Windsor Castle Park Foundation, a nonprofit organization that operates separately from the town, now raises funds for improvements to the park. The park now includes a children’s play area, and in 2021, Ariane Williams, who now heads Isle of Wight County’s NAACP chapter, organized a group of volunteers to revitalize a community garden started by Smithfield Middle School students near the kayak launch. That same year, volunteers, including members of the Virginia Master Naturalists and Smithfield Foods workers, set up oyster castles and planted native grasses at an area of shoreline by Cypress Creek to stop erosion and improve water quality.
“There’s all kinds of people who walk through here now,” Pitt said. “There was nowhere in town you could do anything like this, so this really has turned out to be something pretty good.”
