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