When I was very young, there was nothing I loved more than taking a day trip from Colonial Beach down to Iona, a farm owned by my great-uncle less than an hour away in Mount Holly. It wasn’t just the history of the farm, where my great-grandmother and grandmother had once lived and near where my mother was born, it was the long tree-lined driveway and the herd of black Angus cattle grazing in the fields that appealed to me.
In 2012, according to the Census of Agriculture, there were still 212 family farms and a total of just over 59,000 acres of farmland in Westmoreland County surrounding Colonial Beach. That number has decreased through the years. It was down 11 percent just since the 2007 census. A few had under ten acres. Only twenty had a thousand acres of more. Most fell somewhere in between.
The farms raise not just cattle and vegetables, but fruits and tobacco, and produce cows’ milk and eggs, and even offer Christmas trees along with various crops for grains.
The Martin family farm, where Mildred Grigsby grew up, represents a lifestyle that is slowly fading.
A LIFETIME OF FRIENDSHIP:
Jackie Curtis and Jessie Hall
Though one was born on Tangier Island and one was a Colonial Beach native, Jessie Hall and Jackie Curtis bonded in first grade at Colonial Beach Elementary School and have remained friends for decades. Their shared memories of growing up in Colonial Beach are good ones, rooted in the school they both loved, the men they married and the churches to which they belong.
Jessie, the daughter of a waterman, was born in 1930 on Tangier Island in the middle of Chesapeake Bay, but came to the beach before starting school. Jackie, whose father was with the Virginia marine patrol, grew up right across the street from the school and remembers her fascination with watching the linemen when electricity was first installed. Her father was a patrolman on the river during the era of the Oyster Wars, and she recalls him finding bullet holes just above his patrol boat bunk during those wild days of confrontations on the water.
The two women laugh often as they tell tales from their childhood and from their teen years.
Jessie met the man who would become her husband, Donald Hall, in first grade, also. He was a year older. “He’d been kept back a year. He likes to say it was because the teacher liked him too much to let him go on to second grade.”
The two women reminisce about spending all day with friends, riding bikes, roller-skating. “We just had to be home before dark,” Jessie says. “Now you have to watch your children every minute.”
Her father, like so many others in town, worked at Dahlgren, but also, like others, ran a sideline business on the boardwalk during the summer months. He operated a shooting gallery on the boardwalk during the years when there were rides, casinos, a dance hall and a roller-skating rink. There was dancing and music at Joyland, and she and Jackie both loved music, “but our mothers wouldn’t let us go there.”
Jessie Hall, 1946
Donald Hall, 1946
Jessie Hall, 1946
Jessie and Jackie, 1945
Jessie and Donald Hall on their wedding day
There was little question in Jessie’s mind that Donald was the man for her. By seventh grade they were a couple. After graduation in 1948, he joined the army and served in Korea. They married on October 23, 1948 and had two children, Wanda and Donald Junior. After his military service in Korea, Donnie worked at nearby Dahlgren.
Jackie met Harley “Buddy” Reamy in fifth grade, and they went all through school and graduated together. Three years later, he joined the army and was sent to Germany. Happy to be back home and away from the war, he said, “I don’t care if I never go out the Beachgate again!”
Buddy later worked at Dahlgren and then opened a real estate office. They also had two children and had been married thirty-seven years when he passed away.
Ten years later Jackie remarried. Robert Curtis was from a much bigger town in Illinois, and she worried that he might not like small-town life. “But this is such a nice place to take walks, ride bikes and drive golf carts along the river,” Jackie says. “Bob enjoyed this so much. He told me, ‘I love it here.’”
A widow again now, she says softly, “I liked being married. I liked sharing my life with someone.”
Jessie as a hula girl
The two women recall their school days as if they were yesterday. They were “Drifters”—the name of the school mascot—through and through. They love the fact that their children went to the same school that they did and grieve over the wintry January night in 2014 when a fire—later determined to be arson—burned down the building where they’d attended classes and made so many memories.
One of their favorite teachers was Claudia Kitts. During her era the students performed Spotlight Revues, which were short skits or musical numbers. “Jackie, Donna Davis and I were the Andrews Sisters,” Jessie recalls. Some of the lyrics were surprisingly risqué, they thought, still laughing about the fact that they were allowed to perform them.
For one number the girls wore costumes that included skirts made of crepe paper. “Eleanor Inscoe’s fell off, and she ran off the stage,” Jessie remembers.
What they remember most about Mrs. Kitts, though, is that they enjoyed learning. “We’d dance the Virginia reel or an Irish jig at recess. She made learning fun,” Jackie says.
The town held a huge party for her when she retired in 1968.
Just because their own graduations and those of their children were long ago, it hasn’t stopped their loyalty to the Drifters. Jessie and Donald still attend every high school basketball game and talk with pride about their championship runs and the year they brought home the state trophy.
But if the school played
