Memories of Beverly Beach
By Peggy Davis

Beverly Beach has been a place for family, friends, and fun for nearly a century. It's been a place where hard working folks used what Mother Nature provided to make a living. Times have changed but the memories of Beverly Beach are rich and deep. Recently Meg Davis contacted us to say that her mother had much to tell about our community in bygone days. Peggy Davis spent summers at her Grandma’s house in the 300 block of Cadle Avenue. The house had a sleeping porch, and a screened in eating porch. Grandma made one room into a library for herself and her family. Peggy hand pumped water from the well, used an indoor cistern type toilet, and attended Sunday services at a house in the community where a missionary priest came to celebrate a Catholic mass. Sometimes, the family would go all the way into town to St. Mary's for services.

Terry Berg interviewed Peggy at her current home in Hollywood in St. Mary's County. This is the tale Peggy had written and presented to her. 

Beverly Beach, 1928 to 1944

In the late 1920*s, my Grandmother Inez Mayo Hawkins, purchased a house on the corner of Cadle Ave. in Beverly Beach.  My family spent summers there beginning with the first day after school ended in June, returning home to D.C.

when the next school year began in September. We lived on a one-block walk to the creek cove where the main object was for my father to push off in his fishing boat, sometimes staying for several days and nights at a time. Our cottage was named Hiawatha, on a wooden plaque over the front door, in honor of Grama’s favorite poem.  

My brother, Dick, and I would leave the house early in the morning, walk to the main beach front and not return home until dinner time.  There was no thought of children being kidnapped or assaulted; it just didn't happen in those

wonderful care-free days.  And so, my mother had no fear of letting her children be at the beach front alone each day.  Of course, we got many a severe sun burn at the beginning of summer, suffering through until our skin turned very brown!  There were several high wire bars, what seemed to me as high as the sky. We performed many tricks on those bars, and people threw pennies to the sand below for our performances. We scurried down after a while, retrieved our loot, and ran to the pavilion to purchase ice cones in a cup, or perhaps, a cup of water that cost a nickel each. I met my first boy friend on the beach when I was 13, and we ran on the sand along the seashore, to the north, for what seemed like a mile.  My recollections are numerous, of how burning hot the sand became to my feet, and particularly, of how white and clean the sand was all along the beach front; if you didn't keep running, your feet would actually burn. I recently made a pilgrimage there, and felt disconnected from the changes - the sand, particularly, no longer as gleaming white. 

The Pavilion was a wonderful place to a young girl; especially, for the name bands that played there on weekends, where I danced for the first time with boys.

My father, Kenneth Hawkins, was a friend of the owner of Beverly Beach, Mr. Kalb, and I recall standing with them in conversation many times.  I remember the exact day Mr. Kalb told us he was closing the beach because he had been ordered by the court to make it a more open beach to all people, no matter their race or creed.  He refused to do that. The full impact of that did not occur to me until, without our ability to use the beach front, my grandmother sold our house, and Beverly Beach became only a memory. 

The Thompsons lived across the street from us, and my parents were friends with Mr. and Mrs. Jennings who lived down the sloping street, close to the cove.  I recall an elderly couple by the name of Corprew (not sure of spelling) who lived 2 houses from the cove.

There was a black community living on the edge of the cove. They were desperately poor, and all winter long my parents set aside clothes, shoes, blankets and household goods to take to them in the summer. Most of all, I have fond memories of my father's closest friend there, known only to me as Hetty.  He came frequently to our back woods, calling to my father.  If my father was not home, he left, never choosing to approach our house when only my mother and I were home. I can hear them laughing now, and picture the baskets of rockfish they caught, running over the top.  Hetty’s mother was Annie and she had a dozen or more children.  The poverty they survived is shocking to me today. Years later, we heard that Hetty was dying of tuberculosis, so my husband and I fixed some food to take to him. We entered his tiny house, only to find him unconscious, but in some kind of misbegotten hope, I left the food thinking he might eat it. To this day, it is a very sad memory.  

One personal tragedy was the drowning of my mother's 21 yr. old brother. On a dark night out fishing, a boat without lights sliced my father's boat in half. The rest of the fishing party successfully swam to shore.

Our house was next to woods that bordered a curve on the main road.  Some sailors and their girl friends were speeding in a convertible, from the beach late at night, when they crashed on that curve.  My parents ran out, carrying the wounded onto the floor of our house until emergency help came.  To a child, that was a scary experience.

Instead of a refrigerator, we had an ICE BOX.  Requiring a huge square of ice frequently, my brothers and I took turns pulling a little red wagon to Mr. Collison’s store (still there, I might add), to have him put new ice on our wagon with his big, black ice tongs. The ice house was located on the left side of the store, to which a large ice truck pulled up each day.

Did I mention the only unpleasant thing about the beach front * the public BATHROOMS?  Oh, it's impossible to describe the horror of going in there, just impossible, but I will leave it to your imagination!!! Suffice it to say that was before modern plumbing. 

I feel that if my grandmother had not chosen that place at that time, I would be devoid of all these precious memories of the original Beverly Beach that consumed such an impressionable, happy era in my childhood.