How Colonial Beach Saved Its Museum Building

11 minutes ago

8 min read

From information compiled by retired U.S. Army Colonel John Biemeck for his lecture on the restoration of the Museum at Colonial Beach

Before the Museum at Colonial Beach could display a single artifact, volunteers hauled away eight pickup loads of junk. They cleared the overgrowth along the building, replaced broken window glass, and used an old photograph to work out how to rebuild the missing porch. The town had marked the building at 128 Hawthorn Street for demolition. By the time Mayor Bone cut the ribbon, two rooms were ready for visitors.

Retired Colonel John Biemeck led the restoration and became the museum’s first curator. In notes prepared for a podcast on November 4, 2026, at 5 p.m., he recorded how the work was done, what it cost, and who did it. He also traced the many lives of the building the volunteers set out to save.

Before it was a museum

Long before Colonial Beach was a resort, Indigenous people returned to the Potomac shore to harvest oysters. William & Mary archaeologists investigating the Gouldman site for a bridge project recovered about seven tons of oyster shell, more than 700 pottery fragments, and more than 1,100 stone artifacts. Charred hickory nutshells from three samples yielded date ranges spanning roughly 160 BCE to 140 CE. The finds suggest that people returned seasonally over generations. Biemeck’s notes give a precolonial population estimate of 6,000 to 10,000 without specifying a geographic area. The excavation documents repeated use of the site. [1]

Biemeck’s early chronology also notes Lord Baltimore’s 1632 charter, an 1853 account of 50 men and three horses, and a lawsuit over the removal of white beach sand. For the resort’s beginnings, the town and a state architectural survey trace Henry J. Kintz’s purchase of the roughly 650-acre White Point Farm to 1878. Biemeck’s notes give 1881 and 750 acres. Kintz and newspaper editor James A. Clark helped lay out the planned resort in 1882, with a hotel site near the river and roads and parks leading toward the waterfront. The town incorporated on February 25, 1892. By 1906, steamers such as the St. Johns were bringing thousands of visitors from Washington, D.C., to its hotels and boardwalk. [2] [3] [4] [5]

Biemeck credited William Billingsley, a builder and town official, with constructing the building in 1892. The Historical Society’s detailed property timeline also gives 1892 and records that Billingsley bought the lot at an 1890 tax sale. The National Register nomination describes a late-1890s seaside cottage with a front porch and a second-story deck, while the society’s general history page gives 1862. The surviving accounts agree more closely on what happened inside the building than on when it went up. For his account, Biemeck drew on Jackie Shinn and Joyce Coates’s “Remember When” series in the Westmoreland News, which ran from 1992 through 2000, and listed the book This was Potomac. [6] [7] [8]

A private school occupied the building around 1898. Biemeck named Agnes Jones as the teacher, while the society’s timeline identifies Eleanor Agnes DeAtley as the likely teacher. By 1905, the building housed the Colonial Beach Progress and, in Biemeck’s account, its print shop. A 1908 photograph recorded the building’s early appearance. By 1918, Sak’s men’s clothing store was downstairs, where a suit reportedly cost about $20, and there was an apartment upstairs. In 1924, the Colonial Beach Pharmacy occupied the ground floor, with an office upstairs that Biemeck associated with Doc Stuart. The 1920s remodel removed the porch and deck, put in a large storefront window, and moved the door. [6] [7]

East Coast Utilities moved into the building in 1928 and remained until 1940, according to the society’s timeline. Biemeck’s notes trace the power utility through Virginia Power to Dominion. Over the years, the building also held Mr. Jones’s barbershop, a lunchroom, a grocery, and a bakery. In the 1940s, it housed the local telephone switch and a place to make long-distance calls. The society’s timeline records 52 trunk lines and shared party lines around town. Western Union operated there too, and during World War II the telegraph office delivered news about loved ones. [7]

By the 1950s, customers could buy appliances at the front of the Hoffman-Cooper Gas Company office and pay their bills at the back. Peter Hoffman also served as a justice of the peace, and the society’s timeline records that several couples married in the building. Much later, Florence Tally ran Reflections, an antiques and collectibles shop, there from 1988 to 1995. [7]

From demolition list to restoration project

As the building fell into disrepair, its future became tied to the boardwalk and downtown redevelopment. Biemeck recalled that the town took the property by eminent domain and dated the condemnation to 1993. The Historical Society’s timeline places the building on the demolition schedule in 1997 and dates the town lease to 1998. Residents petitioned for the lease so they could turn the building into a museum. [7] [8]

Biemeck recalled joining the group in 1997. The society dates its formal founding to 1998, the year the group decided to renovate the building and open a museum. Its president, William “Bill” Hendrix, appointed Biemeck project manager. The town’s Public Works Department had filled the building with junk. Hendrix, Kyle Schick, and Biemeck provided trucks for the cleanup, while volunteers cleared the overgrowth along the side. Frank Vargo took on fundraising and brought in about $5,000, or about $10,300 in September 2026 purchasing power if measured from the 1998 annual U.S. Consumer Price Index. Biemeck rounded the comparison to about $10,000. [8] [9]

Restoration began in September 1998. Volunteers replaced broken glass and made the building weathertight. Biemeck named Town Manager Art Buswell and his wife Doris, Councilman Paul Tsompanas and his wife Mary, Mary Kaye Wolfe, Frank Vargo, Skip and Betty Whitestone, Bobby Cooper, Bill Hendrix, Kyle Schick, and Biemeck himself, then a town councilman, and his wife Jonell.

Rebuilding the porch started with figuring out its dimensions. Steve Zurcel located the spot where the old photograph had been taken, and the crew found the original footings. They hired a contractor, picked out six-by-six pillars, and found matching old windows and a 36-inch door at an antique shop. They removed the storefront window and door and reconstructed the porch to match the photograph.

The work inside

Sonny Camp handled the HVAC work, William Hall did the electrical work, and woodworker Wilbur Goldman made display cases. Biemeck had glass and lights installed in the cases, then painted them and fitted locks. Carpet squares came from the Marriott Café. Biemeck finished the interior walls and widened doorways to 36 inches for accessibility. When the crew discovered termites, they had to clear what he described as 50 years’ worth of junk from under the building. A bathroom had already been added when water and sewer service became available. Mary Allen donated money for curtains, which Jonell Biemeck picked out and helped hang.

When funds ran low, Barbara Cooper brought Biemeck an anonymous $1,000 contribution. It helped cover the accessibility ramp and finishing touches. Skip Whitestone and George Payne helped pour the concrete footings for the ramp, and Biemeck finished building it.

Biemeck listed the project’s only expenditures as porch reconstruction, HVAC, electrical work, two display cases for the back room, Marriott carpet squares, cabinet glass from Eastside Glass Shop, termite treatment, an alarm system, and building materials. Volunteers covered the cost of the materials they contributed and received no reimbursements.

Opening the museum

As the museum’s first curator, Biemeck advertised in local newspapers for exhibits. Offers poured in, so he set up an inventory system to track which items were loans and which were gifts. The museum reused old cabinets from the Cooper Store. The cabinets came from a local business with its own connection to the building. Abraham and Rebecca Cooper opened their general merchandise and hardware store in 1916, and the Cooper family was involved in the Hoffman and Cooper Gas Company that later occupied the museum building. Among the most prominent displays were a large aerial photograph of the boardwalk in the 1950s and an original framed color map and advertising brochure showing Colonial Beach lots and attractions. [6]

The museum opened to the public in July 1999, according to the Historical Society. The speaker introduction gives July 3 as the date. Biemeck recalled that Mayor Bone cut the ribbon after about ten months of work, with two rooms ready and the upstairs still to do. His notes list July 3, 1998, as the date set for the grand opening, but they also date the start of the restoration to September 1998. The society’s published history corroborates the month and year of the public opening. [8]

The next phase turned the former public telephone room into the Waterman’s Room. Skip and Betty Whitestone helped Biemeck paint it. They preserved the World War II-era graffiti on the walls and gathered exhibits about Colonial Beach watermen in the room. It opened to visitors at a December 1999 open house. The room’s subject reached well beyond Colonial Beach.

Conflicts over fishing and oystering on the Potomac helped bring about the Maryland–Virginia Potomac River Compact of 1958. Congress authorized it in 1962, and the commission charged with managing the tidal river’s fisheries first met in January 1963. [10]

Passing on the keys

By then, Biemeck had become the Historical Society’s second president and was also serving as vice mayor. He was active with the Chamber of Commerce and was juggling the society’s treasury, membership committee work, newsletter, records, and curatorial duties. After more than five years on the Town Council, four as vice mayor, he wanted to finish a five-volume encyclopedia series on BP projectiles found in North America.

When his terms with the society and council ended, Biemeck handed the keys to Art Buswell, the new Historical Society president. Rosemary Higgs took over as curator. She and Biemeck inventoried the collection together and accounted for every item. Buswell led the society for more than a decade, adding an extension, moving the restroom to the building’s interior, installing a new HVAC system, and adding exhibits and other improvements.

The National Register nomination records a later rehabilitation in 2011 that returned the porch, upper deck, and residential-style front windows. In 2021, the museum building was listed as a contributing property in the Colonial Beach Commercial Historic District, which entered the Virginia Landmarks Register in June and the National Register of Historic Places in September. [4] [6]

Biemeck ended his account with a short reflection. “Proud of what I was able to do to get the Museum off the ground and operating.”

About Colonel John Biemeck

At the time of the lecture, Biemeck had lived in Colonial Beach for 34 years. Before joining the Town Council after his retirement from Marriott, he had been Marriott’s resident director of operations at its corporate headquarters. He had previously served more than 27 years in the U.S. Army, commanding at company, battalion, and brigade levels. His final command was the 82nd Airborne Division Support Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The speaker introduction described him as one of the most decorated officers on active duty at his retirement, with 15 medals, including the Distinguished Service Medal.