A Small Town Love Story: Colonial Beach, Virginia. Sherryl Woods

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