He estimates that those who own these docking facilities have in the neighborhood of ten million dollars in capital investments in their operations. Add in what boaters spend on service, equipment, groceries and so on while visiting Colonial Beach or staying on their boats, he calculates that’s another two million dollars contributed annually to the local economy.
“Colonial Beach was once a place for old boats to go to die,” he says. Now the boats coming to the beach can range anywhere from one hundred thousand dollars on the low end to one that’s worth three-quarters of a million dollars. He, among other marina owners, including Kyle Shick of the Colonial Beach Yacht Center, fought a boat tax that the town once levied, arguing that boaters already contribute greatly to the economy. The added personal property tax for docking in local waters on a permanent basis would only send them fleeing to a more welcoming, less costly port. Many of the marinas, including Bill’s, suffered severe damage in a freak storm in spring 2017, but quickly worked to repair slips and buildings to be ready for the summer season.
But while pleasure boating has taken its place at the forefront of businesses making a living from the area’s waters, the town still has families who recall a different time, when they earned their livelihoods on the water in a variety of unusual ways, from building sought-after boats to running fishing charters, from distributing seafood throughout the region to catching muskrats. A few still do.
Here are just a few of the stories of those unique, colorful individuals. It’s a history as important to the town as the nearby birthplaces of George Washington, James Monroe and Robert E. Lee and just as memorable.
Jumping off the old diving board
A LIFE BUILT AROUND OYSTERS:
The Curleys
Few families in Colonial Beach are more identified with making a living from the nearby waters of the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay than the Curleys.
Landon Curley, who founded the Curley Packing Company in 1932, “loved oysters,” says his son Rusty. “That was his thing. He’d see oyster boats lined up in the creek [Monroe Bay] and nothing looked any better to him.”
At one time the boats lined up in droves, side by side, so close together you could walk across the water by hopping from one deck to the next, Rusty and others recall about the heyday of oystering in the 1950s.
Monroe Bay Marina
A flag flying from a pole outside the packing plant suggested to the working watermen as they entered Monroe Bay the kind of prices they could get for their haul by bringing it to Curley’s, rather than other packers in town or elsewhere. And there, not only would they get top dollar, they’d find a welcoming place to spend an evening with good food, lively company and some competitive pool games.
“You couldn’t find a more colorful group of people,” Rusty recalls. “They might not have had the purest language, but they were good people. They had a respect for women.”
And the watermen came back season after season from Tangier Island and around the region because Landon Curley treated them right. Rusty still talks longingly of one who’d always bring some fig preserves made by his wife.
Sometimes the men would go home, leaving their boats docked at Curley’s as they visited family. They’d leave one man behind to make sure any water that seeped into the boats was promptly pumped out. “He used to say the sweetest sound he ever heard was of that pump sucking air,” Rusty recalls of the hard, laborious task.
Possibly because they were still young at the time, the siblings—Rusty and his older sisters, Linda and Candy—say their father never discussed the Oyster Wars that were raging for a time on the waters of the Potomac during the 1950s. He never mentioned if watermen from Virginia were illegally dredging from oyster beds at the bottom of the Potomac River in defiance of the law. Nor did he discuss the lax Virginia patrols or, by contrast, the fiercely protective Maryland patrolmen, who were often taunted by the determined oystermen with their faster boats, some of which were owned by Curley himself.
Inside Curley’s Oyster House
Original Curley’s oyster can
Yet the legend of Maryland patrol boats firing on watermen, sending a hail of bullets into boats and on to shore during that era is well-known. Almost anyone living near the water during that period has a story to share of hearing the middle-of-the-night shots, witnessing the gunfire or finding bullet holes in buildings just onshore from where watermen outmaneuvered the patrols to seek safety in protected Monroe Bay, which was in less dangerous Virginia territory.
In one account, reported in The Oyster Wars of Chesapeake Bay by John R. Wennersten, at least four hundred people had gathered onshore one wintry night in 1957 to watch as two patrol boats and a seaplane tore after waterman Harvey King in a chase worthy of a Hollywood movie. Bullets slammed into the Wolcott Tavern on the Colonial Beach boardwalk, but luckily no bystanders were hit and King made it to shore unscathed, though his boat was hit. He was arrested, but the squabbling that ensued between Maryland and Virginia was as fiery as the gun battle. Astonishing many, when King was tried eventually in Maryland, he was acquitted.
Curley’s oyster boat
Curley’s Oysters
Landon Curley might have known about the illegal dredging, he might even have owned a few boats that got tangled up in the fighting, but he didn’t talk about it with his children.
The history of that time is well documented in Wennersten’s book, which also describes the gunfight that ended it all with the shooting death of Colonial Beach waterman Berkeley Muse, who was aboard Harvey King’s boat. King, who’d ignored the advice of many after his earlier brush with Maryland patrol boats and the law, was also injured in
