On Chincoteague, a town comes together to save Misty’s ranch

In 1946, reporter Marguerite Henry traveled to Chincoteague Island to write about Virginia’s wild ponies and accidentally fell in love with a trembling-legged newborn with a wet nose named Misty.

Her heart jumped into her throat and she “nearly choked,” she wrote later, when she saw the foal, “new as the morning,” lying adorably on the beach “like a slightly rumpled bath mat.” She had to have her.

The love story changed not only Henry’s life but also the culture of the thin, 7 miles of sand on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean that is Chincoteague.

Henry purchased Misty and within a year published her young adult novel “Misty of Chincoteague.” It won the John Newbery Medal and recognition as a seminal work of American children’s literature.

Earlier this year, the living legacy of that story became at risk of being lost.

The aging owners of the Beebe Ranch, where Misty spent most of her life, were forced to consider the unfathomable: selling their remaining 10.3 acres of land to developers, in the face of rising financial demands.

But then a town came together. Its grassroots campaign saved the ranch at the heart of their island — averting an ending to a story begun one afternoon 77 years ago.

First, love

Henry boarded a train in 1946 near her home in Wayne, Illinois, to Chincoteague because of a chance encounter her editor had at a dinner party, according to a 1996 edition of the Eastern Shore News.

A woman at that party described witnessing this most marvelous kind of spectacle, called a “pony penning,” on a recent trip to Virginia. The editor mentioned the anecdote after Henry submitted a story about a horse. Henry wanted to see the penning for herself.

Today, Chincoteague remains synonymous with wild ponies.

Every year, herds of ponies that live on the neighboring Assateague Island are rounded up by saltwater cowboys who drive them through a small span of water to an auction ground on Chincoteague. These days, only a handful of foals are sold, but a legend surrounding the origin of the ponies still holds: They were marooned on Assateague Island after a Spanish galleon shipwrecked centuries ago.

In 1946, Henry watched as Misty’s parents paddled between the islands and later wrote, “We’d watched breathless as they were driven into the sea to swim across the channel…”

When she happened upon the newborn four days later, a palomino with a uniquely patterned coat, she felt a yearning — “I wanted desperately to take her home to write the book about her.” That led her to find Misty’s owner at the Beebe Ranch.

Henry later described meeting Clarence Beebe, who owned the ranch where he lived with his grandchildren Paul and Maureen, in the book “A Pictorial Life Story of Misty.”

She approached him near the beach where he was rounding up the herd. He turned and asked what was on her mind.

“That little mare colt’s on my mind,” she replied, “the gold one with the white map of America on her side.”

The rancher responded, “Right promisn’, ain’t she?”

But Clarence Beebe hesitated to sell her. She was awfully young. Haggling ensued.

Henry agreed to pay $150, wait to take ownership until Misty was weaned off her mother’s milk, and promised to bring Misty back to Chincoteague to be bred and live with her foals.

Four months passed before a telegram from Clarence Beebe reached Henry on — to her surprise — the morning when Misty was scheduled to arrive:

MISTY ARRIVING NOVEMBER EIGHTEEN VIA C & N W TRAIN NUMBER 3 GENEVA ILLINOIS FIVE FORTY FIVE P M

A little panicked, Henry made it to the station in time and saw Misty pull into town inside a homemade crate with a big C, for Chincoteague, painted on its side.

“There was something precious about the very sight of the crate, as if each slat had been nailed on with love and sadness,” she later wrote. “Right then I resolved to capture all that love and return it twofold in my book.

“A small sneeze from within ended my fine thoughts. My heart fell inside me.”

Henry opened the crate, caressed Misty’s muzzle and buried her hands in the pony’s woolly and wild coat. She vowed to pour her heart into nurturing the baby pony.

Famous name

“Misty of Chincoteague” hit bookshelves the next year, a fictional story of a girl named Maureen and her brother Paul who lived with their Grandpa Beebe on Chincoteague.

The brother and sister who love horses learn the value of hard work while earning enough money to buy a wild pony, Phantom. They succeed, but in the end, decide to release Phantom back to the herds of Assateague Island and instead keep her foal named Misty.

The book was a bestseller. It has been reprinted in 60 editions, translated into 20 languages and read by millions of children — growing Chincoteague’s fame with every generation of young readers — who daydream of riding wild ponies on windswept sands.

Many of the readers turned into adults who purchased bus, train or plane tickets to see where the real Misty was born and the book and its sequels were set.

It transformed Chincoteague’s middling tourism industry. Spectators arrived in droves and boarding houses popped up to accommodate them after the 20th Century Fox movie, “Misty,” premiered at the horse’s hometown cinema in 1961. Misty stomped hoof prints into wet cement in front of the cinema after the showing, according to the Eastern Shore News.

While Henry and Misty had their love story, Chincoteague had its own, with acclaim brought by their book.

A bronze statue of Misty frolicking, her tail swinging, was erected next to the island’s Main Street. When she died in 1972, her body was shipped to the same company that prepped Trigger — a horse co-star to Roy Rogers in Hollywood Westerns— for taxidermy, because she too deserved nothing but the best. Misty stands stuffed in a roped-off display at the Museum of Chincoteague Island.

“It’s very, very important to recognize that this means a lot to our economy here on the island,” said Jay Savage, Chincoteague town councilman and president of the museum’s board of directors. “It’s the story and it’s the ranch.

“You can’t disregard the ranch. You can’t throw it aside,” he continued. “It’s just, it’s just so, so, important to us.”

Chincoteague.com boasts, “tens of thousands” of people from all over the world still arrive to watch Pony Penning Day every summer, as they did this year on July 26.

Henry kept her promise and returned Misty to the island in 1957. Billy Beebe, 69, one of two surviving family members who own the ranch, knows the story too well.

He’s led a life saturated by pony lore.

Home on the ranch

Earlier this year, Billy Beebe stood next to his wife, Bonnie, feeding the four horses that live in the small pasture on the ranch that once had 100 acres. His grandfather was Clarence Beebe. Paul and Maureen Beebe were his first cousins.

Billy Beebe moved to the ranch with his mother and siblings when he was 3. The toddler’s job was to fill a large bathtub for the wild ponies to drink.

“I knew they’d be coming when I heard that thunder,” he said of their cantering hooves.

He remembers his mother charging tourists on penning day 10 cents to view Misty. She later rented out the taxidermied body. Misty died in 1972; Henry returned to the ranch for a final visit that year, before her own death in 1997.

Today, two of Misty’s descendants live on the ranch — Angel and her daughter Drizzle — along with a pony, Pearl, who was bought at an auction, and a neighbor’s horse named Mercedes.

When Clarence Beebe and then his wife, Ida, passed away, in 1957 and 1960, the ranch was divided and left to their 10 children, who sold their pieces over the years. Billy Beebe’s parents kept a portion of their land. In addition to a 42-year career at Newport News Shipbuilding, he ran a summertime museum from 1999 to 2010 about wild ponies on his and his sister’s share of the ranch. He’s spoken to tourists from New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Germany and Japan.

“Misty actually means a piece of childhood,” he said. “We’ve seen grandmothers, mothers and children come to see Misty’s home, and all three generations have read the Misty book. It was dear to each of them, dear to their hearts.”

When Billy and his sister Barbara Gray realized they wanted to sell because of upkeep costs and familial demands, they received one informal offer of about $600,000 from a developer. Cindy Faith, the executive director of Chincoteague’s museum, became determined to stop any private sale. She wanted the Beebes to sell it to the museum.

“It’s a piece of living history that’s integral to Chincoteague,” she said.

In February, she made a proposal: If the museum raised around $625,000, would the family sell to them? The Beebes said yes. But they wanted the money raised in a matter of a few months.

Faith organized small auctions of wild pony paraphernalia, and, Savage said, local restaurants offered discounts to people who donated to the ranch fund, and businesses put signs in their windows pleading for support. Donations came in from as far as France.

As small donations began pouring in, the Beebes agreed to give the museum more time.

This summer, the museum succeeded in a matching $100,000 grant challenge made by an island resident and philanthropist, David Landsberger, bringing its total fund up to $563,000. From there it soon climbed to $625,000. On June 30, the museum purchased the ranch.

“A lot of the people we’ve spoken to would escape into a Misty book, because sometimes they had horrible childhoods,” Bonnie said. “We’ve been visited by even little ol’ grandmas who never threw away their books.”

Legions have told her about how they used to lie in bed at night pretending to be asleep, reading about Chincoteague under their covers by flashlight.

“Anybody who’s read it loved to read and pretend they were Maureen or Paul, because they had the perfect childhood,” she said.

They come to the Beebe Ranch to relive those dreams, and now, still can.

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8139, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com