Still just about every author—or avid reader—dreams of opening a bookstore, and I was certainly no exception. Just like Shanna in the Chesapeake Shores series, I decided to follow my dream and give it a try.
And so, in 1996, a friend and I decided to open separate businesses in a house on Washington Avenue. Mary Warring, who loved antiques, ran Potomac Accents in the front of the house. I opened my bookstore, Potomac Sunrise, in the back. Just a few years after opening, I sold my half of the house to Mary and bought the old Baptist parsonage farther up the street and expanded my business to include a wide variety of gifts, along with my beloved books and a coffeepot that was always filled with my favorite coffee. The discussions with the health department over that coffeepot were almost comical.
Originally my intention was to operate only during the spring and summer months, but it turned out, after an experiment, that fall and especially Christmas were the very best seasons of all. Because I only lived in town part of the year, running the business long-distance was especially tricky, even with some very good and loyal employees. When the pipes froze one winter and sent water cascading through the newly renovated house, I was finally forced to reconsider.
Until then, though, I loved having the chance to talk books with readers from all over who came to the store. Talking local news with residents who stopped in to catch up kept me up-to-date on just about everything going on in town. Every week when the shipments of books turned up or the boxes of gifts I’d selected for various sections arrived, it was exactly like Christmas morning. I couldn’t imagine anything more fun.
But reality took precedence over the joy of meeting new people, discovering new authors and selling just the right gift or card for someone’s birthday or anniversary. After ten wonderful years, I had to close the business in 2006 to focus on the career that paid my bills.
My only regret is that I hadn’t waited until I had more time to be on site all the time. Running a small business requires dedication and personal interaction. Those years with Potomac Sunrise gave me a newfound respect for anyone who can survive the challenges and make a success of such a business. One of these days, I’d love to try it again.
THE TOWN’S WELCOME MAT:
FROM GRANDEUR TO COZY B AND Bs
When I was spending my childhood summers in Colonial Beach, the sprawling Colonial Beach Hotel sat stop a slight hill in the middle of town facing the Potomac River. At the bottom of its sloping lawn, amusement park rides—a merry-go-round, a train ride, a Ferris wheel and a whip among others—dotted the landscape along the water. Delbert Conner, who’d brought gambling to town, owned the hotel, the rides and even the nearby town swimming pool.
DeAtley Hotel
Westmoreland Motel
The New Atlanta Hotel
Rock’s Rooms Hotel
I wanted desperately to grow up and own that hotel, to create a gracious sweeping porch open to the breeze, to have badminton and croquet games on the lawn. Even then, a part of me was living in another era.
Alas, that old hotel, which was purported to have a resident ghost and was the onetime home of General Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, was eventually declared to be too run-down to save and was demolished in 1984, long before I could get my hands on it and create the hotel of my childhood dreams.
Perhaps that thwarted desire led to my fascination with charming and welcoming small hotels such as The Inn at Eagle Point in the Chesapeake Shores series. They may eventually knock down some of these gracious old hotels in real life, but I can keep them going in my books.
In the early days in Colonial Beach, visitors had a variety of options. There were boardinghouses all over town, homes where dinner bells rang to call guests in for an evening meal.
Small hotels were situated on the boardwalk and beyond—Rock’s, DeAtley’s, the Wolcott, Linwood House, the King Cotton, the New Atlanta Hotel, the Crown Castle. Many had porches with rocking chairs and a view of the water, or was certainly within walking distance of the Potomac. Some had their own restaurants.
Alexander Graham Bell House
There was a scattering of small, local motels—the Wakefield, the Westmoreland and others—long before chains became the norm across the country. And during the gambling heyday, when casinos were built on piers over the river, every motel, hotel and boardinghouse room was filled with those who came for family vacations, to gamble or to listen to music from the likes of Guy Lombardo, Kate Smith and Patsy Cline.
When the gambling was outlawed in 1959, many of these smaller boardinghouses and gracious, if small hotels that dotted the Colonial Beach landscape died with it. Motels were shuttered or their rooms rented to transients or to churches offering a hand to someone down on their luck. In some cases paint peeled and lawns were overrun with weeds.
In their place came a handful of rental cottages and bed-and-breakfasts. The most famous of these is the Bell House, once the summer home of Alexander Graham Bell. A pale yellow Victorian with a wide porch and a sweeping view of the Potomac River, it had a gracious proprietor in Anne Bolin, who was proud of its history under the ownership of the man who invented the telephone and even allowed my publicity photo to be shot on that front porch. The Bell House was filled to capacity on many summer weekends. Its fate is in doubt now due to Anne’s passing on February 17, 2017.
And then there is Doc’s Motor Court. Doc’s is in a class by itself. Opened in 1948, it sat just across the street from the main beach and the town
