“You’ll learn just like I did,” he responded and went off to the “real” job she’d insisted he get before she’d marry him.
So Ellie learned and the guests came, many of them over and over again through the years. Her notes reminded her of which rooms they preferred, which festival or holiday drew them here, and anything else that she needed to know to make them welcome.
But though Doc is gone now and Ellie closed the motor court a few years ago, Ellie remembers the repeat customers even without those detailed notes. And the guests still come back to reminisce, begging to stay one last time, though the doors have been locked tight. Often she lets them, as long as they bring their own sheets and towels and leave their favorite rooms as clean as they found them.
That’s just who Ellie is, as welcoming as a favorite aunt, a storyteller with a long memory and a quick wit.
Not too long ago my cousin, Michael Fitts, an artist who lives in Charlottesville, was here visiting. I told him and his brothers and their wives about Ellie and about Doc’s. Mike’s eyes lit, his artistic sensibility awakened. He immediately turned to his wife. “That’s the place we saw. I told you I wanted to stay there.”
When I mentioned that to Ellie, she immediately said, “Bring him by.”
And I will, because no one should miss the chance to meet Ellie Caruthers. And for those of you who might never have that chance, here’s her story. She remembers well what it used to be like when Colonial Beach was crowded with tourists who, it seems, were always welcomed like family.
Doc’s Motor Court
MAKE NO MISTAKE, IT’S A MOTOR COURT, NOT A MOTEL:
Ellie Caruthers
Eleanor “Ellie” Mae Crary Caruthers is quick to distinguish Doc’s Motor Court from the motels that have proliferated all over the United States for the past half century or more. As the caretaker of this quaint Colonial Beach piece of history and all its stories, she wants to make sure that visitors understand the difference, not that it’s hard to spot.
Two short rows of single-story, white structures face each other at a slight angle across a courtyard reserved for guests to park their cars right in front of their rooms. On many a summer day guests could be found lined up in old-fashioned, brightly colored metal chairs on the narrow stoops outside their doors or at the edge of the property with its stunning view of this miles-wide stretch of the Potomac River just before it flows into the Chesapeake Bay. A clothesline is strung between posts for hanging damp beach towels and bathing suits, adding to the oddly homey atmosphere.
Doc’s parents, Dr. and Mrs. Veola Caruthers
Families gathered at the end of the day to talk, wet bathing suits were hung out to dry and, on the Fourth of July, way back in the day before the town set off fireworks on the nearby Town Pier, guests would get a permit from the town and shoot off their own. Once one of the returning families had done it, others insisted on doing it too, creating increasingly lavish displays on the annual holiday. Guests were even frontrow witnesses on the night the town’s fireworks started a fire and a town fire truck drove onto the pier to put out the blaze and crashed right through into the river.
Ellie remembers it all, every detail about those first fireworks, every request made by the regulars, which rooms they liked and even stories they told. She talks about the Potomac River Festival parades passing by and more recently the congestion caused by a change in the traffic pattern. She finds it all endlessly fascinating.
But unlike her husband, who saw the need for such a place in this small but busy little resort town nestled on the shores of the Potomac halfway between Washington, DC, and Richmond, Ellie had never intended to live such a life in such a place.
Born in 1927 at Vanderbilt Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, the daughter of a brick mason, she discovered at an early age just how tough life could be. In 1934 the banks went broke and her father lost everything—his business, their home, their belongings. With help from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s WPA program, the family moved to the nation’s capital where her father found work.
Doc Caruthers on left
“They called them the Greatest Generation,” she says, her tone wry. “It wasn’t because they were something special. It was because they were tough. They managed to live through those hard times.”
For a time her father did whatever he could to support his family, digging ditches before finding work once again as a brick mason and then eventually starting his own business. He obtained government contracts, worked on monuments and did some of the brick work at Georgetown University, she recalls with pride.
Ellie worked hard, too, commuting to a distant high school to complete her education, then going to nursing school and getting a job at Gallinger Hospital, which later became DC General, and after that a residence for the homeless. The first time she had a vacation coming to her, she talked about it with her dad. They wanted to celebrate by doing something different, going someplace they’d never been before after years of visiting nearby Maryland and Delaware beaches. Her dad had been working at the Dahlgren Naval Surface Warfare Center just outside of Colonial Beach, so they chose Colonial Beach for their holiday.
“We rented a cottage up on Twelfth Street from the
