A Small Town Love Story: Colonial Beach, Virginia

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.

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.