A Small Town Love Story: Colonial Beach, Virginia

Patsy and Mrs. Hall at an early location of Hall’s Store

Westmoreland Drugstore, 1940s

One former resident, a Baptist herself, recalls filling in as organist at St. Mary’s for her music teacher, Mrs. Van Laer, in the 1950s after Mrs. Van Laer had a heart attack. Grace Roble Dirling was only thirteen at the time and ended up staying on in the “temporary” position until she went away to college. In return Mrs. Van Laer gave her free organ lessons.

During the intervening years between the opening of the Union Church and today, the choices for worship expanded—the Colonial Beach First Baptist Church, which had a segregated African-American congregation, the Colonial Beach Baptist Church, St. Elizabeth’s Catholic Church, the Colonial Beach Methodist Church and, among the most recent, the New Life Ministries in 1984 and the River of Life Pentecostal Church.

If the town was lively in its earliest years, thanks to summer visitors who arrived by steamboat or ferry and later, after the opening of the Nice Bridge between Maryland and Virginia via US Route 301, by car, it was nothing compared to the hordes that came during the town’s gambling heyday.

Pool party, 1958

Casinos, built out over the Potomac on pilings past the high water mark to put them officially into Maryland waters, first opened their doors in 1950. Brightly lit with neon signs in true Las Vegas fashion, the Little Steel Pier, Jackpot, Monte Carlo and Little Reno casinos turned the boardwalk into a beehive of activity. Some reports suggest as many as twenty thousand weekend visitors came to town to gamble at the rows of colorful, noisy slot machines.

But if the slot machines were the draw for some adults, there was more than enough for children and families to do along the boardwalk. Amusement park rides sprawled across a grassy area, along with a miniature train—The Little Dipper—that wound its way around the perimeter. Dancing and roller-skating were available in Joyland. Carnival-style games in open booths—a shooting gallery, a ball pitch and ring tosses, among others—drew crowds.

Walk-up food vendors offered everything from snowballs in a rainbow of flavors and frozen custard, to peanuts, popcorn, hot dogs, hamburgers, French fries and corn dogs. Souvenir shops sold the usual mementos. And the sounds of competing bingo parlor announcers filled the salty night air, adding to the allure of their tables of prizes. Some of the carnival and Depression glass items given away for a handful of winning tickets back then are still prized by collectors.

Sunrise over Colonial Beach

Small hotels with rockers on the porch dotted the boardwalk, as well—Wolcott’s, DeAtley’s, Fries and Rock’s. Alice Rock was something of a town legend and served as grand marshal of the town’s Potomac River Festival parade to honor her contributions to the boardwalk’s lively heyday.

Remains of Little Steel Pier after Hurricane Hazel

Colonial Beach boardwalk destroyed by Hurricane Hazel

Damage by Hurricane Isabel

Colonial Beach boardwalk destroyed by Hurricane Isabel

When it came to merchants in town, among the most notable were the Foxes, the Coopers and the Klotzes. One of the first general merchandise stores was opened by Harris Fox on Hawthorn Street and touted that it sold everything from “candy to caskets.” The Klotz family later opened its Gem Five and Ten Cents store in that location. Not far away, Cooper’s was opened with an equally diverse range of merchandise. Its slogan was “We Sell Everything.” After it closed, the land was donated to the town and became the Cooper Branch of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library and the Colonial Beach Town Center.

Though far inland from the Atlantic Ocean, Colonial Beach has not been immune to hurricanes and other major storms. A 1918 storm destroyed property and wharves in town. Further damage was done by another storm in 1933. Hurricane Hazel in 1954 slammed into the boardwalk and knocked casinos from their pilings. There were reports of residents flocking to the Potomac in search of any surviving liquor bottles and coins from the slot machines. Hurricane Agnes hit in 1972 and most recently, in 2003, Hurricane Isabel destroyed or seriously flooded restaurants and other property on the water.

During virtually the same years as the gambling heyday, there was a different kind of chaos on the waters of the Potomac. After World War II, both Maryland and Virginia banned the dredging of oysters from the bottom of the river. Dredging, experts believed, destroyed the oyster beds. Oystermen were restricted to tonging, a more labor-intensive technique intended to protect the beds and keep oyster supplies flourishing.

Maryland patrol boats, however, were reportedly far more aggressive about enforcing the restrictive law than Virginia officers. And Virginia-based watermen were seemingly far more determined to harvest oysters by dredging. They took their boats, often equipped with exceptionally fast surplus military engines, out at night and continued dredging. These cat-and-mouse games during the era that came to be known as the Oyster Wars erupted into wild chases on the water with guns blazing and spectators on shore observing the battles as if watching a Hollywood action movie.

Only when the battle turned deadly in 1959 with the shooting of Colonial Beach waterman Berkeley Muse did the Oyster Wars end. Legislation eventually formed the Potomac River Fisheries Commission in 1962 to regulate fishing, oystering and crabbing on the Potomac. In the documentary, Watermen of Colonial Beach, written and directed by John Sweton, the then-head of the Fisheries Commission, Kirby A. Carpenter, was asked if the commission had been successful. His reply: “I don’t know if it’s been successful, but nobody’s lost their life over a damn oyster.”

With access to the casinos in town outlawed in 1959, around the same time as the end of the Oyster Wars, life turned calm in Colonial Beach. Crowds no longer flocked to the tiny seaside town. Hotels and motels closed. Buildings along the boardwalk stood vacant and were eventually sold to the town and torn down. The landmark Colonial Beach Hotel took in its last customers in 1981 and was torn down in 1984.

Some say that was the beginning of the end for the tiny community, still with fewer than five thousand year-round residents. Others point to another change that affected the town’s identity. Its first actual shopping center, on Euclid Avenue at First Street, opened in the 1970s with an A&P grocery store, a drugstore, a Ben Franklin and a hardware store. The post office, which had also been at the center of the once-thriving downtown area where people crowded the sidewalks on Saturdays especially to shop, chat with neighbors and get their mail, also moved to First Street, about a block from the shopping center. That change ended the days of an informal gathering place where news was shared.

Swans enjoying the waters of Colonial Beach

Now neighbors run into each other on a casual basis only during the Second Friday Art Walks to various galleries scattered around town, at one of the summertime concerts or events on the town’s green, at church suppers or occasionally in the aisles of the Food Lion or Hall’s store just outside of town.

Like all small towns, times in Colonial Beach have changed. It has reinvented itself time and again over the years and, no doubt, will again.

Sloan Wilson, famed for writing The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which later became a movie starring Gregory Peck, lived for a time aboard his boat at Stanford’s Railway Marina on Monroe Bay. In his self-published book, A Talking Boat: The Story of the Yacht Hermione, he described Colonial Beach as a town that “has a lot of quirky charm” and “a somewhat raffish reputation.”

Locals prize those apt descriptions, but wonder if they’ll ever apply in quite the same way again.

REMEMBER WHEN:

Jackie Shinn

Perhaps no one in Colonial Beach has more of a fondness for and knowledge of Colonial Beach history than Jackie Shinn. Not only has she lived in town her entire life, having grown up in her grandmother’s boardinghouse, but for many years she and her dear friend Joyce Coates operated the Another Time antiques shop and wrote columns for the weekly Westmoreland News called “Remember When.”

“Our most popular column ever was about the Eastlake murder,” she says without hesitation.

It was a grisly story that few newcomers to town knew anything about, but it was the stuff of local gossip for years after it happened.

Miss Sarah Knox, a nurse from Baltimore, was charged with the September 30, 1921 murder of Mrs. Margaret Eastlake, the wife of Miss Knox’s alleged lover, Roger Eastlake. Eastlake, a naval petty officer stationed at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division, was also charged in his wife’s death, but later acquitted.

Articles from the time describe the murder weapon as a newly sharpened hatchet and the scene as a particularly bloody one.

Not long before the tragedy, Mrs. Eastlake told a friend that she feared for her life. The witness testified that she and others with whom Margaret Eastlake had shared her fears had dismissed them. She hadn’t been calmed by their reassurances and told her friend, Mrs. Rachel Collins, that she planned to leave her husband, take their two children and return home to Philadelphia. That decision came too late.

The tragic scandal rocked the town, according to Jackie.

Most of the stories and bits of history that Jackie and Joyce shared with readers were far more benign. Their columns were filled with information and nostalgic photographs. “People were glad to share the information and pictures they had,” she says of their efforts that lasted until new owners took over the paper and the column was discontinued.

Many of the columns were collected and self-published in volumes that are available at the Colonial Beach Historical Society and at the town library. They also put together another book, a pictorial history crammed with photographs they had collected.

Jackie’s grandparents

Their efforts to preserve bits of town history to inform residents about the town’s fascinating past also had a very practical application. When a building at the corner of Washington Avenue and Hawthorn Street was about to be demolished, they provided information on its past as host to a wide variety of businesses, including an early telephone company location where residents without phones could make calls. They were credited with saving the building, which now houses the Colonial Beach Historical Society, and were given honorary memberships in that organization.

Jackie’s grandmother

Jackie’s own family story figures in the town’s historic past, a time when many visitors to the small resort community stayed in favorite rooming houses. While there were any number of homes taking in guests in that era, her grandmother’s rooming house drew large crowds for meals.

“It was nothing for her to serve a hundred people for dinner,” Jackie recalls. Many of them were guests in other homes, but took their meals with Jackie’s grandmother.

“We’d have chicken on Sundays with mashed potatoes, peas, lima beans. It was served family style,” she says. “There was always homemade cake and ice cream, too.”

She adds, “I can cook, but not like they did then.” Her mother would even pack lunches for guests who planned to spend the day on the beach or boating.

“We’d sit on the porch and sing at night,” Jackie remembers with unmistakable nostalgia. “One man had a beautiful voice and played the piano. Another played a guitar.”

Her grandmother was careful to assign any potential troublemakers to a second house, rather than the one where she, her sister, Connie, and their mother lived. Those guests went to a different rooming house.

Jackie and her husband, Donnie, who originally moved to town from North Carolina, lived in one of those former rooming houses until recently. “It was way over a hundred years old,” Jackie says with real regret. “Things were beginning to happen to the house. The earthquake a few years ago [in 2011] didn’t help. There was just too much that had to be fixed.” They sold it for the price of the land.

Jackie’s husband, Donnie

While Jackie’s own ties to Colonial Beach ran deep, Donnie’s weren’t as strong. He was already sixteen when he and his family came to town. He worked at Reno casino for a time. He drove the school bus.

Eventually he spent five years in the army and developed an interest in computers. He got two degrees and worked for a contractor at Dahlgren. His work was related to the nation’s Tomahawk missile program. He taught at Germanna Community College and at Dahlgren as well, even after he retired.

During that time, Jackie ran the tiny Colonial Beach office for the county’s weekly paper, the Westmoreland News. For forty-five years she sold ads and wrote the community news. For thirteen of those years she cowrote the “Remember When” columns.

She laments the fact that so many old buildings are being torn down, but feels she and Joyce did their part to record the fascinating bits of history that are slowly being lost as buildings come down in the name of progress or just because no one had the foresight to preserve them well.

“We had so much history here. Everybody loved Colonial Beach then. It reminds me of Cabot Cove,” she says, referring to the fictional town on TV’s Murder, She Wrote. “We didn’t have to worry about things.”

Back in the day people gathered on the boardwalk just to watch all the activity, have a snowball and catch up with their friends.

“There’s nothing there now,” she says. In fact, one of the last things to draw a crowd on the boardwalk was the stacking of the modular units that became a condo building just a block away from the town pier. Locals brought chairs and sat for hours to watch them being lifted into place.

For Jackie that brief bit of excitement was nothing compared to the way it used to be when the boardwalk was crowded with activities, including a variety of bingo parlors. “I won a starburst clock at one of them,” she recalls. “It stayed on my living room wall for years.”

Many people in town still have bits of carnival glass, Depression glass or other prizes from those days.

Her love for the town is evident in everything she says, in the descriptions of her fondest memories. “Donnie thought about leaving,” she admits. “But he knew I loved it here.”

And so they stayed, surrounded by memories that not only filled her heart, but gave her in many ways her life’s purpose.

Another Time Antiques Store

Jackie Shinn today

EDITOR’S NOTE: Donald Shinn passed away on January 13, 2017, but Jackie continues to live in her beloved Colonial Beach.

A NAVAL NEIGHBOR

Though the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division is not in Colonial Beach or even in Westmoreland County, it is one of the town’s largest employers of both navy and civilian personnel in jobs ranging from computer specialists and engineers to painters and secretaries. In all, its staff of approximately 5,200 from Colonial Beach, King George County and beyond is actually larger than the entire population of Colonial Beach. Many of the people you’ll meet in these pages have worked on the base in one capacity or another.

Opened in 1918 and named in honor of Rear Admiral John Adolphus Dahlgren, a Civil War–era navy commander with a specialty in ordnance, Dahlgren’s Potomac River Test Range has allowed for the test firing of various weapons developed by base experts. Patrol boats are still visible on the river on days when tests are being conducted to keep boaters out of the range.

The booming sound of those tests shakes the ground, sends dogs into a frenzy and leaves pictures on the walls of every home perpetually crooked.

Amazingly, during my college years, I often played golf on the base course with a friend who was on his college golf team. Whenever I hear a professional golfer grumbling about the click of a camera shutter, I think perhaps he or she should spend a few practice sessions at Dahlgren with those guns firing. Nothing as inconsequential as a camera shutter would ever affect his or her concentration—or backswing—again.

I also recall a particularly noisy day right after the start of the first Gulf War when a couple of missiles fired from warships reportedly missed their mark. The testing of those guidance systems went into overdrive on the Potomac, and corrections were seemingly made within hours of the misfires, a real-time demonstration of the value of the work being conducted on the base.

Walter Purcell and buddies, WWII

Colonial Beach naval officers, 1940s

The War Memorial in Colonial Beach

William Hall, Tommy Powell, John Lewis, Donald Hall, 1948

Naval Proving Ground, Dahlgren Virginia, 1955

A STORY OF FAMILY AND FARMING:

Mildred Grigsby

Mildred Grigsby, at ninety-four, is a study in contrasts. Her petite frame dwarfed by a large recliner and wrapped in a blanket featuring one of the World Wrestling Entertainment’s superstars, she’s well-known in Colonial Beach for the delicacy of her crochet work, mostly done as she sat on the back of a truck while selling vegetables by the side of the road.

The needlework skill is something she believes her mother must have taught her at an early age, and it was something she took to that kept her hands busy as she sold those vegetables and raised her large family. Her beautiful doilies, tablecloths and table runners are prized possessions in homes all over town and a stark contrast both to that WWE throw and to the hardships of growing up working on the family farm.

Mason Grigsby with one of his daughters

“I think everyone must have at least one thing she crocheted,” her granddaughter says.

Mildred Martin had eight brothers and sisters, all raised on a farm just outside of town. She and one brother are the only ones still living. She and her husband, Mason Grigsby, had six girls.

“Any boy that came along would have been spoiled to death,” she jokes.

The family’s ties to the land go back a generation or more. Her parents had moved to the farm from Maryland before she was born. She went to Oak Grove High School, six miles from Colonial Beach, where many of the locals were bused for several years until the high school returned to the “beach.” She recalls walking to school.

In another of those contrasts that mark her long life, she compares the solitude and hard work of farming with the excitement of a visit to the beach, even though it was only a few miles away. She remembers going to Colonial Beach on the weekends as if it were an adventure far from home. It was certainly a far cry from the life on the family farm.

Concrete boardwalk, 1930s

Mildred and Mason Grigsby

Back in the 1930s and ’40s when she was a girl, the boardwalk wasn’t a boardwalk in the traditional sense. It was made of concrete, and in fact, there was a street running along beside it. She remembers going to the Klotz store for penny candy. “They had everything you needed there,” she says.

On the boardwalk in those days she recalls the bowling alley, the dance hall and roller-skating rink, beer places and bingo, a shooting gallery and, of course, the storefronts that sold snowballs, popcorn and peanuts. There were lunchrooms that sold hamburgers and hot dogs, too.

“There was a lot to do from May 30 till September,” she remembers. She says she never went to the dance halls or pavilions, “but I loved to bowl.”

In later years she even worked as a waitress in some of the restaurants along the boardwalk, and she can list some of her favorite places in town back then—Caruthers and Coakley drugstore. Mrs. Kennedy’s icecream stand, the Emporium on Hawthorn Street, the old A&P and Wolcott’s Hotel and Restaurant.

Alice’s Big Bingo game on the boardwalk

When she married Mason Grigsby, they had the ceremony on Christmas Day. “He worked and I worked. I was on vacation. He worked at a gas station.” Christmas was the one day they were both off.

She was working in a pants factory in Fredericksburg by then, along with several friends. For ten years they piled into a station wagon and made the trip to the factory together.