Sweet Summer Memories of the Waycross Colony

Frances Peabody McKay spent her childhood waiting for summers on St. Simons Island. For 36 years, Frances’s family spent three months a year occupying two cottages in the Waycross Colony, a group of small vacation homes clustered beneath the St. Simons Lighthouse. Although the clapboard cottages were destroyed by fire in 1934, Frances’s book about her family’s time there, More Fun than Heaven, describes years’ worth of island memories.

As children, Frances and her siblings looked forward to swimming in the ocean, playing with their “summer friends,” and riding the steamer to the island from Brunswick. For the Peabody family, summers at the Waycross Colony were truly a family affair. Their cottages housed the Peabody children, their mother and maternal grandparents, their grandmother’s aunt, and a host of other aunts, uncles, and cousins who came to visit.

Frances held onto fond memories of the “goodie shelf” in a corner of her grandmother’s bedroom, “which was always full of gum drops, marshmallows, hard candies, and ginger snaps.” One summer, when Frances’s cousins visited the Waycross Colony, her grandmother brought marshmallows off the shelf for dessert. Frances’s three-year-old cousin Helen had never tasted a marshmallow before and was desperate for another. She sneaked into her grandmother’s room and seized the biggest marshmallow she could reach. It turned out to be a bar of Ivory soap. “She came running out of the room with Ivory soap bubbles coming out of her mouth, spitting and choking,” Frances said. “As soon as she could talk, she was saying, ‘I don’t want it!’”

Despite this incident, the “goodie shelf” remained a tradition in the Peabody family. Frances, her mother, and her siblings unpacked and furnished their summer cottages as soon as they got off the steamer. There were important tasks to be done, like spreading out mattresses and moving furniture. One of the first tasks Frances’s mother completed, though, was placing “the gum drops and ginger snaps … on the three rough shelves built into a corner in her bedroom.”

This month’s image from the Coastal Georgia Historical Society archives depicts a view of the Waycross Colony, the nearby beach, and the St. Simons Lighthouse. The photographer was W. Archibald Wallace of Huntington, West Virginia.

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