summer rest road
From top: Taylor Smith Riley’s childhood
waterfront c. 1980.
Three generations: great grand-parents
Burrows and Nettie at
left, Great-Great Grandmother
Smith at right, and Grandmother
Jean and Great Aunt Nancy, front.
was originally part of a neighborhood of summer vacation cottages, a
place to find rest during the sum-mer
months.
Located just north of the
entrance to Wrightsville Beach
lies a secret hidden to many.
There is a visible change when
you make that left hand turn off
of Wrightsville Avenue, past the
space where the Babies Hospital
used to be, and over the small
bridge spanning a small tidal
pond. You drive through the
cool canopy of giant live oaks,
blanketed by moss. Vivid blue
water sparkles on the right,
teeming with the daily activ-ity
of a thousand boats — the
busy thoroughfare of the
Intracoastal Waterway. A
variety of houses line up on
the left, mostly new homes
or remodeled versions of
older ones, they hold the stories of many
generations of coastal living. My family spent many generations at
311 Summer Rest Road — the white house with the wide planked
porch, the neat green shutters, the upstairs dormer windows with their
expansive view of the water below. I was one of the last of my family to
curl up in the arms of the massive oak at the end of the driveway, find-ing
comfort and dreaming.
My great grandparents, Burrows Lansing Smith and Nettie Fleming
Smith, first moved to Summer Rest Road in the fall of 1920. They were
a young couple with a small baby (my great aunt Nancy Smith Rose)
and it was the only house they could afford. It was called the Cooper
summer cottage. Back then the neighborhood was made up of small
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WBM november 2013