Neighbors, Boats, Bayfront Summers and a Reverence for Tradition

Owings Beach is still cozy.

There are still snug cottages, built in the 1920s for summer getaways to the bayside enclave in the Deale portion of southern Anne Arundel County. Narrow streets bearing local family names are still walkable because deep ditches and tight turns discourage traffic.

Even if Owings Beach's water and dock access weren't for residents only, outsiders would have a hard time finding any place to park. There just isn't room.

Betty Seddon, now a reading teacher, was one of many Washington area children who spent summers visiting relatives in Owings Beach. "We could catch a bushel of crabs in an hour just walking around with a net," she said about those days more than 55 years ago. She now lives in a waterfront home facing Herring Bay, which opens into the Chesapeake.

There were always plenty of cousins and friends around to share summer days. At night they bunked on sleeping porches to take advantage of cool breezes.

Frequent motorboat trips south to Chesapeake Beach offered Seddon and friends a chance to pull levers on slot machines -- with little hands gripped by those of parents to circumvent the rules against underage patrons.

George Tolson, a grandfather of seven who used to live in Southeast Washington, recalled how his father saved gas ration coupons during World War II so George could spend summers with his grandparents in Owings Beach. "In the mornings, you could hear the one-cylinder flywheel Palmer engines -- ka chunk, ka chunk-- as fishermen headed out," he said.

Tolson's 1922 bayside cottage is hung with generations of family photos and depictions of the community over the years.

Owings Beach was a farm owned by German immigrants named Knopp in the 1880s. Alvin "Butler" Knopp said his grandfather sold the property to a developer named Owings in 1920 for $3,000 but held back about 30 acres, where Alvin and several other Knopp family members still live.

Tolson has a 1920 plat showing undeveloped waterfront lots for $400, while landlocked ones cost $175 to $225.

Knopp, 89, who made his living working on boats, said Owings Beach was "a ghost town" in the winter. The Knopps and the Masons (who developed the adjacent community of Masons Beach) were among a handful of families remaining in the area year round.

Karen Fultz, a 1969 graduate of Bladensburg High School, moved to a 1930s cottage in Owings Beach three decades ago. Even then, she said, winters were deathly quiet. "At 6 o'clock, there wasn't a light on in Owings Beach."