No Cookie-Cutter Community: Bayberry Believes in Dirt, Difference

"Fall into winter, with a potbelly stove," Peggy, Mel and 18-month-old Steve lived in a windy shack, she said.

When daughter Susan came along a few years later, the family moved to their second home in the neighborhood. All told, Hancock has lived in three Bayberry houses.

"Every house we lived in, my husband built a bar and a clubroom. Back then, hon, you didn't go out to places, you'd stay home," she said. "We were friends. We weren't just neighbors. We partied together."

Just outside Hancock's house lies Scheide's Cove, the waterway named for her first husband in 1977.

"Mel put up steps and a pier so people could get down to the ice to skate. They'd have ice hockey games, and we used to take pots of hot chocolate," she recalled. "And that's why they named it after him."

Hancock's son, Steve Scheide, now 58, said he was the only child in Bayberry at first.

"Let's just say the Magothy was my friend," he said. "During summertime, my mother would put me in a rowboat and tie the boat's rope to her waist."

His mother would push a net along the river bottom as she walked along the shoreline, he said.

"She'd pick up soft crabs. I'd wrap them in seaweed," said Scheide, who now lives in a development nearby.

Life in Bayberry today is not that much different. The Chapman family lives in the Scheides' first house, and 9-year-old Noah "loves fishing," said his mother, Linda Chapman. "Sometimes we'll drop chicken necks off the big pier."

Chapman, 45, grew up in adjacent Ulmstead Estates. "If you have water around you growing up, you always yearn for it," she said. And so she and her husband, Andy, spent many weekends looking at waterfront homes, almost as a hobby.

When they bought the house in 2006, it was far from perfect. "There was standing water in the basement," she said. Renovations took two months.