Sherryl Woods - A Small Town Love Story - Colonial Beach, Virginia

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