Colonial Beach Commercial Historic District Designation with DHR
- cbhsmuseum
- Aug 24
- 9 min read
Summary Paragraph
Colonial Beach was founded in the late nineteenth century as summer resort community along the Potomac River, catering mostly to residents of Washington, D.C. The Colonial Beach Commercial Historic District encompasses the town’s six-block business district, as well as a portion of two streets that bring visitors from the state highway into downtown. The historic district lies just to the west of the riverfront, where steamboat wharves, amusements, bathhouses, hotels, and restaurants lined a boardwalk and beach during the town’s resort heyday. The historic district includes one- to two-and-a-half-story commercial, civic, and residential resources within its boundaries. Among the buildings in the historic district are former town government edifices, important commercial institutions such as a former bank, and two buildings that formerly housed U.S. post office locations.
One- and two-story shops, along with turn-of-the-century hotels and boarding houses, mid-twentieth-century motels, and former filling stations are located within the town’s commercial center, while residences, churches, and restaurants mark the edges of the historic district. The two main streets in Colonial Beach – Washington and Colonial Avenues – are the district’s primary arteries. Notable resources in the historic district include the house associated with White Point Farm, the property that was platted for development in 1882 (199- 5037-0005); the circa 1904 former home of the Bank of Westmoreland (199-5037-0006); St.Mary’s Episcopal Church (199-5037-0039), a Gothic Revival building designed by Washington, D.C., architect Alexander H. Sonneman; the Queen Anne style hotel formerly known as the Breakers (199-5037-0008); a Craftsman style house called Greystone (199-5037-0042); a onestory World War II-era commercial building that once housed the local post office (199-5037- 0007); and a 1947 Art Moderne diner (199-5037-0062). 1 The overall historic integrity of the district remains moderate to strong, with many resources retaining a high level of integrity of location, setting, feeling, and association, and a moderate level of integrity of design, materials, and workmanship, The moderate qualifier results from the use of replacement materials such as vinyl window sash and siding and asphalt-shingle roofs, as well as alterations such as rear additions and enclosed porches. The loss of buildings from the period of significance also diminishes the district’s integrity in these areas.
Narrative Description
Setting
The town of Colonial Beach, located along the Potomac River on Virginia’s Northern Neck in Westmoreland County, was developed as a resort community beginning in the late nineteenth century. The Colonial Beach Commercial Historic District encompasses the primary commercial streets of the town – Colonial Avenue, the northern boundary of the district, running from the state highway (SR 205) at the edge of town to the Potomac River; Washington Avenue, which defines the western boundary of the district; Irving Avenue North, running southeasterly from Washington Avenue through the commercial center; Wilder Avenue and Dennison and Hawthorn Streets, which run east from Washington Avenue; Beach Terrace, on the east along the public beach; and Boundary Street, the district’s southern edge.
The historic district was all part of the town’s original 1882 plat, which envisioned the transformation of the 650-acre White Point Farm into a riverside resort community catering mainly to residents of Washington, D.C. The Potomac River, on the east, and Monroe Bay, which forms the west boundary of the town from Dennison Street on the north to Gum Bar Point on the south, are the two geographic features that most clearly define the town’s setting, providing picturesque views throughout the year.
The historic district is located partly on the peninsula formed by these two bodies of water, just west of the central stretch of the town’s public beach. Between Wilder and Colonial Avenues, the land rises approximately ten feet east to west over the course of a single block, providing a view of the river from automobiles traveling along Colonial Avenue toward downtown, as well as from the prominent ridge on which Colonial Beach School (no longer extant) was built in 1912.
Along much of its eastern edge, the historic district is separated from the Potomac River beach by new development and empty lots, which have taken the place of the steamboat wharves, hotels, boarding houses, restaurants, amusements, and, later, casinos that historically occupied the eastern border of downtown.
Lots, as laid out in the town’s early development, were frequently narrow and deep – 40 to 50 feet wide and 145 to 170 feet long. Although the area within the Colonial Beach Commercial Historic District is generally set out on a grid plan following this general arrangement, North Irving Avenue’s angled course alters typical lot sizes and shapes in the business center. In addition, subdivision of property over time has often resulted in smaller, less regular lots to fit the small stores, offices, and residences built in the district. This is especially true along Hawthorn Street and North Irving Avenue. In this area, buildings stand close to the street with little landscaping, creating an urban environment. Most vacant lots in the district are turfed over and sometimes dotted with trees.
Residences occupy most of the west side of Washington Avenue and both sides of Colonial Avenue and Boundary Street within the district, providing greater building setbacks and more green space. Colonial and Washington Avenues are broad, two-way, asphalt throughways, lined by sidewalks with curbs and gutters, utility poles, and street signs. The town’s public festivities – the annual Potomac River Festival in June, as well as Christmas and Easter events – take place along these two streets. The other streets in the district are narrower, and several are one way. While they also generally feature sidewalks, utility poles, and street signs, a few stretches have sidewalks only on one side of the street or sidewalks without curbs or gutters. Buildings in the historic district are generally small in scale, one- to two-and-a-half stories tall, and include building types that might be expected in a resort town’s commercial center, although not all are used for their original purposes.
A former bank, two former post offices, one- and two-story shops, three motels, two hotels, a boarding house, three churches, two former filling stations, a fire station, restaurants, two fraternal organization lodges, and numerous houses and cottages all stand within the historic district’s boundaries. Building styles dating to the period of significance (1875 to 1970) range from folk and high-style Victorian-era residences to the Gothic Revival St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, the classically inspired former Bank of Westmoreland, and the Art Deco Riverview Motel. Vernacular residential and commercial buildings make up about half of the building stock. House forms include cottages, bungalows, American Foursquares, and I-houses. A five-story condominium development on the east side of Irving Avenue North – and outside the historic district boundaries – as well as demolished buildings (approximately a dozen within the district, more along the waterfront) are the primary alterations to the district’s setting since the end of the period of significance.
Description of Historic Resources
The Colonial Beach Commercial Historic District contains buildings from all phases of the town’s history. This situation results partly from the use of wood as the primary construction material in the early development of the town and its vulnerability to fire and storms, to which Colonial Beach has been subjected.. Infill construction often replaced the damaged, demolished, or deteriorating earlier buildings. The evolution of the town’s tourist economy from weekend excursions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries toward longer stays and yearround residency also contributed to the diversity of building types and materials found in the historic district. Buildings that survived the effects of weather and time and remained useful continued to be occupied, often serving several different functions over the years, while replacement buildings manifested the purposes, styles, and building materials of their period of construction. The following descriptions of a representative selection of historic resources in the district is organized chronologically to follow these changes. An inventory of all the resources in the historic district is located at the end of the descriptions.
Early Development The only extant building within the historic district boundaries thought to have existed prior to the development of the town of Colonial Beach is the farmhouse associated with White Point Farm, purchased by Henry J. Kintz in 1878 for the development of a resort community. Today, the house’s address is 120 Boundary Street (199-5037-0005) on the southwest corner of the district. Westmoreland County property records indicate that the house was built circa 1875. The residence is an I-house with a two-story, single-pile form. This vernacular house type was common in rural settings in many parts of the United States beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The house has a cross-gable roof, is clad in weatherboards, and fenestrated with two-over-two, double-hung sash, wood windows with louvered shutters. The front (north) façade of the house, with its center bay entrance, features a one-story, full-width porch that has a wood railing, square posts resting on brick piers, and a hipped roof with exposed rafter tails, Two buildings constructed in the early years of the town’s development represent both the variety of late-nineteenth-century dwellings in Colonial Beach and how domestic structures were often converted to commercial use in the downtown area. Frank Schwartz built a Queen Anne style house at what is now 100 Dennison Street (199-5037-0008) at about the time he became Colonial Beach’s first mayor in 1892, the year the town received its charter from the state of Virginia.
Two-and-a-half stories tall, with a prominent conical turret on the northeast corner (at the intersection of Dennison Street and Irving Avenue North), the house was one of a mirrorimage pair, according to reports. Schwartz’s half of the pair had been converted to a hotel, known as the Breakers, by 1905.2 The building, now the Dennison Street Inn, exhibits few later additions and retains or has had restored many Queen Anne details, including the turret, complex roof line with multiple dormers, paneled wood double doors with transom at the entrance, and full-width porch with bracketed posts.
Vernacular construction from the period is represented by the two-story building at 128 Hawthorn Street (199-5037-0001), now the Colonial Beach Museum. The building was constructed in the late 1890s by William Billingsley for the Rollins family in the form of a seaside cottage, according to a 1998 survey of the property, with a front porch on the north and a second-story deck above.3 German lap, wood siding covered the exterior walls. In 1898, the house was converted to use as the town's first private school and has since been home to, among other tenants, a newspaper, a clothing store, an electric company, and, for many years, the Hoffman and Cooper Gas Company. Commercial use resulted in the removal of the porch and deck and the insertion of a large storefront window on the ground floor. Rehabilitation of the building in 2011 for the museum returned the porch, deck, and residential-type windows on the north. The building retains its two-over-two windows on the second floor of the façade and on the other elevations. It has a standing seam metal roof and restored siding,
The downtown area included a number of wood-frame store buildings in the late nineteenth century. One of these is the commercial building at 116 Hawthorn Street (199-5037-0020), originally constructed at the northwest corner of Boundary Street and Washington Avenue. It was built to house a clothing and dry goods store operated by Jake Sussman. A two-story building with wood siding, two-over-two, double-hung, wood sash windows, and a hipped roof, it was moved to its present location on Hawthorn Street about 1943 after a fire destroyed an earlier commercial structure there.
A one-story storefront with a central entry flanked by display windows was added at this time. In the 1950s, a small one-story addition was constructed on the west to house a jewelry store, and a new brick-veneer storefront replaced the previous one, moving the entrance to the east and expanding the display windows. The building housed a fiveand-dime store from 1946 until the 1980s, operated for most of that time by Walter and Marguerite Klotz.4 The building remains much as it looked in the 1950s, except for the color scheme, with white-painted aluminum siding having replaced the earlier dark wood weatherboards.
Accommodations for summer vacationers to the town ranged from the late-nineteenth-century, 100-room Colonial Beach Hotel (no longer extant) near the river along Colonial Avenue, as well as smaller, purpose-built hotels and boarding houses and converted high-style residences such as the Breakers. Vernacular domestic designs would also be converted into guest accommodations, as was the case with 203 Dennison Street (199-5037-0050), a Folk Victorian residential building constructed about 1885 and employed as both the Eckington Hotel and the Jordan Boarding House.
Now the St. Mary’s Episcopal Church Thrift Shop, the building has been modernized in recent years with vinyl siding and windows, upgrades to heating and addition of air conditioning, and installation of an exterior egress stair. Character-defining features, however, remain evident. These include the house form, a two-and-a-half-story, three-bay, center passage dwelling with a prominent cross gable on the main façade and a one-story, hipped roof, full-width porch. Such forms were popular in the late nineteenth century in both rural and urban contexts. As is the case with several residential buildings in town, 203 Dennison also has a onestory rear wing that may have served as a kitchen.
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