Sandra founded a Facebook group, Memories of Colonial Beach, which has an active online presence with both locals and with those who grew up in town but have since moved away. The group also gathers monthly at Hunan Diner, a Chinese restaurant attached to an actual old dining car, to share personal memories, town history and photographs.
Though she married a marine and traveled extensively, after her divorce Sandra gravitated back to the town where she grew up and the house where she was raised. She still lives and works in Northern Virginia, but spends weekends at the beach and plans to retire there. “You know everybody in town and everybody’s friendly,” she says.
That doesn’t mean there are things she wouldn’t change. She’d like to see the school system take better advantage of the nearby experts in various fields at the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren.
“I read somewhere that Lord Nelson had his first ship when he was fourteen,” she says to explain why more attention needs to be paid to giving broad-ranging experiences to kids at the high school level.
She’d like to see the weekenders who own property take a more active role in the town. More importantly, she’d like their voices to be heard by town officials. Too often, though, they’re ignored because they can’t vote in town elections. They do, however, pay town taxes, Sandra argues, and should have some say in town decisions that affect them.
When the town’s reputation is tarnished, when there’s negativity about the past, she’s offended by it. “I want to try to heal this kind of stuff,” she says, then adds with passion, “I want people to be proud that we have such a unique history in this town.”
Riverboat on the Potomac OTB, 2013
A COMMUNITY’S SPIRIT
Though the very first school in Colonial Beach dating back to 1907 was a one-room building with seven grades and a single teacher, the still-tiny school district holds special memories for just about everyone who grew up in town. Even those who attended high school classes, when they were held outside of town at Oak Grove and the team was called the Vikings, hold tight to a sense of pride now that the high school itself is back inside the town limits and the students are known as Drifters, a name chosen by the students themselves.
The one-room Jefferson School outside Colonial Beach
The Second School built in Colonial Beach
Colonial Beach Elementary School, built in 1912
When enrollment outgrew the sturdier brick building erected in 1912, determined town residents and school officials held fund-raisers of every conceivable kind, including auctioning off a donated house, to raise the money needed to build a new high school.
It wasn’t just nostalgia or even the belief that the youth in town needed to have a school system with its own identity, it was the sense of pride people in town take in the school’s athletic achievements. For years basketball was the primary source of that pride, but other sports have increasingly added to the community spirit that centers around the school.
As a summer kid, I was seldom around during basketball season, but two of my friends back then played on the high school team. I managed to get to town once to see both Marge Owens and Mike O’Neill play in what is lovingly referred to as “the cracker box” gymnasium.
Alumni go to games. They offer scholarships to encourage college attendance. Some mentor individual students. When the school building that many attended burned down and was later demolished a few years back, a lot of people wept as flames consumed the building on a cold, wintry morning.
Perhaps no two individuals have done more to foster this sense of community involvement or to attract support for the school’s athletic programs than former Athletic Director and Coach Wayne Kennedy and Coach Steve Swope. Both now retired, they talk fondly of the young men they mentored well beyond their athletic feats in basketball, football, baseball and track. They boast proudly of individual achievements and records, of a hard-earned state championship. But mostly they talk about the sense of family that high school sports has created among players…and throughout an entire community.
School fire, 2014
School fire, 2014
Elinor Inscoe at bat at the foot of the school, 1946
2nd Annual Science Day at Colonial Beach High School
Last graduating class at the old school, 1988
DRIFTER PRIDE:
Wayne Kennedy and Steve Swope
In a town with under five thousand residents and graduating classes so small they’re barely the size of an English class in many school systems, sports teams are the pride of Colonial Beach, and few are more responsible for the local legends than longtime Coach Steve Swope and Athletic Director and Coach Wayne Kennedy.
Both retired now, they still have vivid memories of the players and the seasons that brought the town together. None is more memorable than the boys’ basketball team that went to the state finals and brought home the trophy in 2009.
An endless parade of cars, perhaps 350 or more, made its way back to town from Richmond that night. Once home the parade circled the Point, horns blowing, people cheering.
“I looked back and there were car lights as far back as I could see,” Steve recalls.
“And by the time the first cars made it around the Point, there was a traffic jam with cars still in line to start going around the Point,” Steve says. “It was like the movie Hoosiers. We were met by the police, the fire department and the rescue squad.”
Steve Swope with the “cracker box” table
The magic of that night is memorialized on a sign coming into town. And
