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

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.

      For years after that she worked as a waitress in the original Wilkerson’s seafood restaurant at Potomac Beach, just outside of town. When that restaurant closed, she looked for something familiar to do, and it took her back in a way to life on the farm. She opened a vegetable stand along the side of the road on property that she and Mason owned.

      “We grew some stuff, but mostly we bought from farmers’ markets,” she says.

      Her daughter Shirley Hall adds that they would go to markets in Maryland and down the road in Tappahannock to buy vegetables throughout the summer. And while she sat by her truck selling those vegetables, Mildred crocheted.

      By then Mason was working for the police department. From there he went to work at Cooper’s, a store that claimed to “sell everything.”

      Mason was involved in anything in town that Bill Cooper asked him to do, Mildred recalls. He volunteered with the rescue squad and the fire department.

      Eventually Mason began a carpentry business, doing the sort of work he loved. He even taught woodworking at the school. He worked at carpentry till he died.

      All of her girls graduated from the school at the beach, married and stayed in the area.

      Mason Grigsby during his carpentry days

      “We’re a close-knit family. We had to take care of Mama and Daddy,” Shirley says. Those tight-knit ties were something Shirley’s parents had taught them, lessons Mildred had learned from her own family.

      Shirley also recalls that she and her sisters were the cleanup crew when their father did his carpentry work.

      “We’d go hunting with him and he’d have us barking like dogs,” Shirley remembers. They hunted for deer, caught frogs and trapped muskrats.

      None of that was as hard as farming, Mildred says. Her family raised corn, wheat and vegetables. They’d take it around by horse and wagon to sell. “That was before trucks.” When they finally bought a truck, it was because “Granddaddy said we’ve got to give the horses a break.”

      The girls in the family didn’t take the vegetables around to the customers back then. “Daddy declared it wasn’t woman’s work,” Mildred says. “I used to think when I was sitting by the side of the road with that truck, I wonder what he’d think about this.”

      For all of the memories, though, Mildred is focused mostly on the family that surrounds her. She has a great-granddaughter and a great-grandson, who were both born on her ninety-fourth birthday.

      The memories are nice, she says, but family is the thing that matters.

      Mildred and Mason Grigsby with two of their great-grandchildren

THE FAMILY FARM

      When I was very young, there was nothing I loved more than taking a day trip from Colonial Beach down to Iona, a farm owned by my great-uncle less than an hour away in Mount Holly. It wasn’t just the history of the farm, where my great-grandmother and grandmother had once lived and near where my mother was born, it was the long tree-lined driveway and the herd of black Angus cattle grazing in the fields that appealed to me.

      In 2012, according to the Census of Agriculture, there were still 212 family farms and a total of just over 59,000 acres of farmland in Westmoreland County surrounding Colonial Beach. That number has decreased through the years. It was down 11 percent just since the 2007 census. A few had under ten acres. Only twenty had a thousand acres of more. Most fell somewhere in between.

      The farms raise not just cattle and vegetables, but fruits and tobacco, and produce cows’ milk and eggs, and even offer Christmas trees along with various crops for grains.

      The Martin family farm, where Mildred Grigsby grew up, represents a lifestyle that is slowly fading.

A LIFETIME OF FRIENDSHIP:

      Jackie Curtis and Jessie Hall

      Though one was born on Tangier Island and one was a Colonial Beach native, Jessie Hall and Jackie Curtis bonded in first grade at Colonial Beach Elementary School and have remained friends for decades. Their shared memories of growing up in Colonial Beach are good ones, rooted in the school they both loved, the men they married and the churches to which they belong.

      Jessie, the daughter of a waterman, was born in 1930 on Tangier Island in the middle of Chesapeake Bay, but came to the beach before starting school. Jackie, whose father was with the Virginia marine patrol, grew up right across the street from the school and remembers her fascination with watching the linemen when electricity was first installed. Her father was a patrolman on the river during the era of the Oyster Wars, and she recalls him finding bullet holes just above his patrol boat bunk during those wild days of confrontations on the water.

      The two women laugh often as they tell tales from their childhood and from their teen years.

      Jessie met the man who would become her husband, Donald Hall, in first grade, also. He was a year older. “He’d been kept back a year. He likes to say it was because the teacher liked him too much to let him go on to second grade.”

      The two women reminisce about spending all day with friends, riding bikes, roller-skating. “We just had to be home before dark,” Jessie says. “Now you have to watch your children every minute.”

      Her father, like so many others in town, worked at Dahlgren, but also, like others, ran a sideline business on the boardwalk during the summer months. He operated a shooting gallery on the boardwalk during the years when there were rides, casinos, a dance hall and a roller-skating rink. There was dancing and music at Joyland, and she and Jackie both loved music, “but our mothers wouldn’t let us go there.”

      Jessie Hall, 1946

      Donald Hall, 1946

      Jessie Hall, 1946

      Jessie and Jackie, 1945

      Jessie and Donald Hall on their wedding day

      There was little question in Jessie’s mind that Donald was the man for her. By seventh grade they were a couple.