LITMIR.BIZ

      Palm Gardens Dance Pavillion and Hotel

      Those years and those friends, plus all those lasting memories, created a lifetime love affair for me with small towns everywhere. Every book I’ve ever written in a small town setting was inspired in one way or another by Colonial Beach, Virginia. A couple of my series, in fact—the Trinity Harbor trilogy and more recently, my Chesapeake Shores series, which topped bestseller lists as novels and TV ratings charts for Hallmark Channel—were set in this very same region and borrowed from at least some of my experiences over the years.

      Colonial Beach has an incredibly unique history, dating back for more than one hundred years in an area that produced the likes of George Washington, James Monroe and Robert E. Lee. Steamboats and ferries brought visitors from Washington, DC, Baltimore and Northern Virginia to stroll a boardwalk crammed with entertainment venues for dancing, dining, bowling and roller-skating.

      There was a love-hate relationship with the gambling casinos and the crowds they brought in the 1950s. Watermen thrived with the abundance of crabs, oysters and rockfish. Local farmers brought truckloads of produce through town, stopping at the homes of their regular customers with everything from tomatoes and string beans to cantaloupes, watermelon and peaches. I loved those tomatoes so much that I used to make my father send them to me via FedEx for my birthday every July when I was living and working fulltime in Miami.

      Then the casinos were outlawed in 1959. Around the same time, the famous Oyster Wars were fought between the oystermen and the authorities over the dredging of the beds in the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay. By the ’60s, the town had reverted to a quiet, sleepy place that has struggled to find a new identity. While I missed the steamboat and ferry era—I’m not quite that old, after all—I was here for the gambling years, the dramatic ending of the Oyster Wars and every transition that has come since.

      Over the years, coming back again and again to the house by the river—rebuilt now into a year-round home, but with a porch and river view and even some neighbors that remain mostly unchanged—I’ve discovered that I am far from alone in my love for this place. This town of fewer than five thousand full-time residents is filled with people who were born here and saw no reason to leave, people who left and came home again, and those who came here, fell in love with the place or a person and never left.

      Cedar Point Lighthouse

      St. Johns at the pier

      Soldiers disembarking the St. Johns

      Aerial view of Colonial Beach Hotel, 1920s

      Sounds a bit like a romance novel, doesn’t it? Just wait till you read about women like Ellie Caruthers, Mary Virginia Stanford and Alberta Parkinson, who met men from Colonial Beach and left their homes and families to build a life here. There are the families—the Curleys, the Densons, the Pearsons and the Wilkersons—who’ve spent a lifetime right here, their businesses an intrinsic part of the town. Each one is as unique as the characters who have populated my books. They have strong roots in the community and a passion for this town that they’re more than willing to share.

      This book tells the stories of people I’ve grown up around and somehow am just getting to know, in that way that we all do with a belated sense of urgency that we need to find out about the histories and the memories before it’s too late for them to be captured. Like Ellie Caruthers, I find myself saying time and again, “That’s so interesting,” as personal stories emerge and real-life love stories take shape.

      But more than capturing the history of this town or these individuals, this is a story of small towns and the lure they hold for so many of us who live in large, impersonal cities and yearn for a different lifestyle, one that may be greatly romanticized in many ways, but still exists in so many others. Neighbors do, indeed, seem to know way too much about what we’re up to, but they also jump in to help when someone’s in need. The schools are the center of much of the social life, right along with the churches and local organizations. The fire department and the rescue squad exist through the heroic efforts of volunteers. I may fictionalize that in my books, but here it’s very real.

      Just recently I went into a small local grocery and restaurant—you’ll read more about Denson’s later—to buy a thank-you gift of wine for someone who’d done me a huge favor. They were immediately able to point me toward the brand he prefers. The big warehouse wine stores may carry a wider variety of wines, but most can’t offer such personalized service. Here, it’s commonplace.

      Departing for Washington, DC

      Arriving at Colonial Beach, 1920s

      Waitstaff know our menu preferences. Neighbors know our habits. For example, following an accident not long ago, I failed to show up for breakfast

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