Excerpts
by Henry Lane Hull
In a recent item, I referenced Mary Costello Cahill in connection with the 300th anniversary of the landing at Jamestown in 1907. During the accompanying festivities on that occasion, she rented a large hotel in Norfolk to welcome visitors for the celebrations, but the venture turned out to be a failure and she returned to doing what she knew best, namely promoting tourism in the Northern Neck.
She was born in Washington in 1864, and as a schoolgirl, she worked for Velati’s Caramels at 9th and G Streets. The firm, founded by Salvatore Velati, an Italian immigrant, had originated in Richmond and moved to Washington after the Civil War. Working there, she learned the value of the dollar, which guided her business decisions for the rest of her life.
In her early 20s, Mary married Walter Cahill and had two sons, Walter and Frank, shortly after which her husband died, and she was left with the prospect of raising the boys as a single mother. She was familiar with the steamboat traffic on the Potomac River, causing her to look into operating hotels at Colonial Beach, then the vacation getaway for Washingtonians.
At the time, the newly constructed Breakers Hotel was available and she leased it at the beginning of the 20th century, beginning a long saga of promoting Colonial Beach as the ideal vacation spot.
The Breakers consisted of a large pair of turreted buildings with an extensive covered, but not screened, open porch between them. The eastern building survives, but the western half was razed in 1962. Mary’s fame spread quickly, with steamboats bringing tourists down the Potomac for weekend visits or longer stays in her establishment. She was a whirlwind of energy and had a great talent for making visitors at home in her establishment.
A tireless worker, she did the cooking herself, feeding the crowds three meals a day. The Breakers operated on the American Plan, lodgers got all their meals there as part of the cost of the rooms, as opposed to hotels that operated on the European Plan, in which the charges for the rooms and the meals were separate.
The Breakers was the “in” place to stay, less than two blocks from the beach, walking distance from the local churches and offering her renowned cuisine. Her sons played important roles in her overall operation. From her tireless toil every summer from late May through September, she was able to save sufficient funds to send each of them to Georgetown University and its law school.
The Cahill era began to come to a close after the First World War. She had learned from the unsuccessful Norfolk venture not to move into unfamiliar territory, but rather to stick to what she knew would work. Unfortunately for her, by the 1920s Washingtonians’ vacation interests largely had shifted from taking steamboats down the Potomac, to driving down through Southern Maryland to Chesapeake Beach and North Beach.
With the construction of the first Bay Bridge in 1952 and the end of the ferry service across the Chesapeake Bay, Rehoboth Beach and Bethany Beach in Delaware became the new vacation scenes for those wishing to get away from the Capital for holidays.
By the 1930s Mary realized that her method of offering rooms and meals had met its day and she retired. By that time, Walter and Frank were successful attorneys in government service and she no longer needed to put herself through the pace of hotelkeeper that had been her career. In spite of all the people she hosted, lodged and fed for decades, she never owned any property in the Northern Neck.
In retirement, she lived with Frank, who never married, at her small home in downtown Washington, always ready to speak of her glory days promoting Colonial Beach and the Northern Neck until she died in 1953 at the age of 89.
