History · The Island, In Order
The timeline From the Nanticoke era to today, one spine — eras, storms, landmarks built and lost, and every dated fact this guide has sourced, in the order they happened. For the story rather than the sequence, start at the history of Ocean City .
496 items on this timeline so far — more join as the dataset grows.
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465 of 496 items
Before the Town (c. 1869–1875)
The Railroad Resort (1876–1916)
Rail Gives Way to Road (1919–1933)
The Great Fire (1925)
The 1933 Hurricane (Inlet Creation)
What the Storm Paid For (1934–1940)
The War Years (1941–1945)
Before the Boom (1946–1951)
Post-War Boom (1950s–1960s)
The Condo Boom (1970–1985)
Getting the Easements (1986–1987)
Rebuilding the Beach (1988–1994)
The Halloween Nor'easter (1991)
The Maintenance Decade (1995–2005)
Bedrooms (2006–2015)
Hurricane Irene Evacuation (2011)
The Horizon (2016–2025)
Pandemic and Rebound (2020–2021)
Fact Feb 18, 1868 The Atlantic Hotel Company is chartered in 1868 — seven years before Ocean City — by Lemuel Showell, James C. Dirickson, Henry B. Johnson and B. Jones Taylor.
Fact 1869 1869: 12 more from the record
Fact 1870 1870: 8 more from the record
Fact 1871 1871: 16 more from the record
Fact 1872 1872: 12 more from the record
Fact 1873 1873: 11 more from the record
Fact Jul 18, 1873 July 1873: a party of prominent Marylanders meets on Synepuxent Beach opposite Berlin to plan a $25,000 summer hotel — the meeting that becomes Ocean City.
Fact 1874 1874: 19 more from the record
Fact Dec 23, 1874 By December 1874 "a fine hotel is now being built" on the new beach — with a Baltimore night boat promising breakfast at the shore.
Built 1875 Atlantic Hotel created
Event 1875 Isaac Coffin Cottage Site existed through
Built 1875 Train Depot Site created
Fact 1875 1875: 14 more from the record
Fact Apr 13, 1875 April 1875: the plan of Ocean City is published — seven streets, four avenues, about 60 acres, and one square reserved for the Atlantic Hotel.
Era Jul 4, 1875 Founding (1875)
Fact Jul 4, 1875 The Atlantic Hotel opens on July 4, 1875 — the day Ocean City dates its birth to.
Fact Jul 28, 1875 "Ocean City, the new resort just below it, in Worcester co., Md., opened this year for the first, with a better hotel and a railroad right up to the back door."
Fact Aug 31, 1875 August 31, 1875: a blindfolded boy pulls names from a hat and Ocean City's first 111 lots are handed out to the Atlantic Hotel Company's stockholders.
Fact 1876 1876: 14 more from the record
Fact Feb 24, 1876 Maryland charters the Ocean City Bridge Company — and the act reveals the bay bridge was already built, privately, without permission.
Fact Jul 22, 1876 "The completion of the pier across the bay, over which the cars bring visitors now to the door of the hotel" — the railroad reaches Ocean City itself.
Fact 1877 1877: 19 more from the record
Fact 1878 1878: 14 more from the record
Fact Dec 25, 1878 On Christmas Day 1878 the U.S. Life-Saving Service opens Station No. 4, Fifth District — Ocean City — with Keeper William T. West and six surfmen.
Fact 1879 1879: 13 more from the record
Fact 1880 1880: 13 more from the record
Fact Apr 10, 1880 Ocean City becomes a town: Chapter 209 of the Acts of 1880, approved April 10, creates "The Commissioners of Ocean City."
Fact 1881 1881: 46 more from the record
Fact May 28, 1881 "The board walks were torn up to a considerable extent and scattered over the beach by last winter's storms" — Ocean City has plank board walks in 1881, and the town is being told to repair them.
Fact Jun 18, 1881 "The bridge across the bay has been torn up, and rebuilt in a very substantial manner. Trains will commence to cross on Monday next."
Fact 1882 1882: 18 more from the record
Fact 1883 1883: 13 more from the record
Fact 1884 1884: 19 more from the record
Fact 1885 1885: 14 more from the record
Fact 1886 1886: 16 more from the record
Fact 1887 1887: 17 more from the record
Fact 1888 1888: 20 more from the record
Fact 1889 1889: 16 more from the record
Fact Sep 10, 1889 The September 1889 hurricane cuts temporary inlets clean across the island, destroys every bath house, and ends the season three weeks early.
Fact 1890 December 1890: the Sinepuxent Beach Company is incorporated to lay 2,000 acres of beach out into building lots — the plat that made modern Ocean City.
Fact 1890 1890: 13 more from the record
Fact 1891 1891: 28 more from the record
Fact Jul 13, 1891 The Sinepuxent Beach Company holds its first lot auction: 470 people off a nine-coach special, and every lot offered is sold.
Fact Aug 22, 1891 Five days before the Republicans meet at Ocean City, the New York Age calls on Maryland's Black leaders to organise — and says the call is already coming.
Fact Sep 19, 1891 Four months before the Annapolis notice, a Democratic paper reports the Frederick club and traces it to "the colored delegates to the late Republican state convention at Ocean City."
Fact Oct 17, 1891 "The new board walk, extending for nearly a mile along the front of Ocean City" — the Boardwalk is new in 1891.
Fact 1892 1892: 63 more from the record
Fact Aug 13, 1892 "Beyond the end of the mile and a half board walk" — Ocean City's boardwalk is measured in print for the first time, in August 1892.
Fact 1893 1893: 45 more from the record
Fact Aug 23, 1893 On the night of 23 August 1893 the breakers rolled clear over the boardwalk, through the parlors of Congress Hall, and out between Congress Hall and Trimper's pavilion until the ocean and the bay met.
Fact 1894 1894: 52 more from the record
Fact Mar 27, 1894 Chapter 128 of 1894 abolishes Ocean City's commissioners and creates "the Mayor and City Council of Ocean City."
Fact May 7, 1894 William S. Wilson is elected Ocean City's first statutory Mayor on the first Monday in May 1894 — the second term the papers gave him under that title.
Fact Aug 30, 1894 The Baltimore, Chesapeake & Atlantic is formed in 1894 by consolidating the Baltimore & Eastern Shore — eighty-two miles, Claiborne to Ocean City — with three Chesapeake steamboat lines, under the sugar-trust man John E. Searles.
Fact 1895 1895: 49 more from the record
Fact 1896 1896: 40 more from the record
Fact May 4, 1896 A year after the sale was reported "completed," the B.C.&A. still cannot buy the Sinepuxent Beach Company — and John E. Searles, its president, is the reason the town election was fought.
Fact 1897 1897: 23 more from the record
Fact May 1, 1897 John F. Waggaman buys the Sinepuxent Beach Company's entire Ocean City estate for $65,000 — hotel, bath houses, electric light plant, artesian well, nine miles of ocean front.
Fact 1898 The Sinepuxent Beach Company's collapse is settled: the Atlantic Hotel and the unsold building lots are John F. Waggaman's, sold to him out of the wreck in 1897.
Fact 1898 1898: 23 more from the record
Fact Aug 23, 1898 "Its boardwalk, extending three miles, is constantly crowded" — Ocean City's walk is measured at three miles in August 1898, four years before the date the town gives it.
Fact 1899 The Pennsylvania Railroad buys the Baltimore, Chesapeake & Atlantic — ninety miles of track from Claiborne to Ocean City, eleven steamers, and the resort's only rail connection.
Fact 1899 The answer to the Sinepuxent Beach Company's collapse: by 1899 Col. John Floyd Waggaman of Washington owns the Atlantic Hotel, the Colonial, Convention Hall and much of Ocean City — and he sells its lots from an office on 14th Street.
Fact 1899 1899: 38 more from the record
Fact 1900 In 1900 Ocean City's board walk is an elevated promenade you can stroll, shelter under, and build a hotel on — two years before its 'official' birth.
Fact 1900 1900: 17 more from the record
Fact Mar 31, 1900 The Isle of Wight Inlet Company's charter to cut a canal through the beach expires on 31 March 1900 while the General Assembly is sitting two days from adjournment — and nobody asks for an extension.
Fact 1901 1901: 37 more from the record
Fact Jul 11, 1901 Ocean City's inlet, thirty-two years before the storm cut it: an artificial cut below the town had already been tried, and "the idea has not been wholly abandoned."
Fact Jul 13, 1901 "Board walks have been laid in every direction leading to the shore" — a July 1901 paper attests planks a year before the boardwalk's 'official' 1902 birth.
Fact Jul 18, 1901 "At nights the boardwalk presents quite a brilliant effect when the four hundred stroll by on dress parade" - Ocean City's promenade, described from the town, July 1901.
Fact 1902 Ocean City got a municipal water system in 1902 — a 110-foot stand pipe and a pumping station — after a long fight the summer hotel men won.
Fact 1902 1902: 35 more from the record
Fact Jun 28, 1902 The Washington Times describes "the stretch of boardwalk" at Ocean City — the silence the county paper kept all year is broken by an out-of-town daily.
Fact Aug 4, 1902 The 4 August 1902 election was contested — "Regular" against "Citizens" — and Waggaman beat William T. Taber 74 votes to 60.
Fact 1903 1903: 17 more from the record
Fact 1904 1904: 22 more from the record
Fact 1905 1905: 16 more from the record
Fact Sep 16, 1905 John F. Waggaman sells his entire Ocean City estate to a Baltimore syndicate, which incorporates in Delaware as the Ocean City Development Company with $300,000 of stock.
Fact 1906 After a violent September excursion, Ocean City moves to have Black excursion trains barred from the resort altogether.
Fact 1906 John F. Waggaman sells everything he owns at Ocean City to the Ocean City Development Company of Maryland.
Fact 1906 1906: 15 more from the record
Fact 1907 1907: 18 more from the record
Fact 1908 The Sinepuxent Salt Water Inlet Company dykes the bay and dredges through the beach — a private inlet, built for oysters, twenty-five years before the storm.
Fact 1908 1908: 15 more from the record
Fact 1909 1909: 13 more from the record
Fact Mar 22, 1909 Ocean City passes Ordinance No. 302 — boardwalks on Atlantic Avenue, cement pavements on Baltimore Avenue, billed to the abutting owners.
Fact Jul 10, 1909 By July the walk is built: "an almost entirely new boardwalk," Baltimore Avenue cemented end to end, and the town preparing for its biggest season.
Fact Jul 24, 1909 At 4.20 p.m. on Saturday 24 July 1909, Orlando Harrison cuts the last strip of sand with a shovel and the Atlantic runs into Sinepuxent Bay.
Fact Sep 6, 1909 Six weeks later the inlet is a failure — the tide has washed sand into it until it is "completely closed up on the bay side."
Fact Sep 25, 1909 Ocean City publishes its accounts for the first time in the campaign's record: $9,709.58 in, $9,348.63 out, $360.95 left in the bank.
Fact Sep 25, 1909 The town's own share of the 1909 walk: $1,065.33 to Henry E. Davis, Jr. for the front board walk, $348.71 of oak lumber, $128.62 of crossings.
Fact 1910 1910: 19 more from the record
Fact 1911 1911: 37 more from the record
Fact 1912 1912: 14 more from the record
Fact May 23, 1912 A mob takes Mary Holzman from her bed and dips her in the fishermen's tar pot — and a Black neighbour three miles out is the only one who will shelter her.
Fact Aug 10, 1912 Ocean City prints its books: $12,851.49 in, $12,493.09 out, and $358.40 left in hand on 1 August 1912.
Fact 1913 Concrete is laid on the Ocean City Boulevard — the road that will make the automobile, not the train, the way to the beach.
Fact 1913 1913: 17 more from the record
Fact 1914 1914: 29 more from the record
Fact 1915 1915: 21 more from the record
Fact 1916 1916: 19 more from the record
Fact Apr 18, 1916 Chapter 665 of 1916 authorizes and requests the State Roads Commission to build an iron, steel or concrete bridge across Sinepuxent Bay at Ocean City.
Fact Dec 30, 1916 The bridge is bid, re-awarded and still unbuilt when 1916 ends: on 30 December the chairman of the State Roads Commission writes Harrison that work will start "next week."
Fact 1917 1917: 23 more from the record
Fact 1918 1918: 30 more from the record
Fact Oct 5, 1918 "INFLUENZA HAS THE COUNTRY IN ITS GRIP" -- Worcester County closes its schools, churches and moving-picture shows in the first week of October 1918.
Fact 1919 1919: 32 more from the record
Fact May 5, 1919 The Sinepuxent Bay highway bridge opens to the public on 5 May 1919 — Ocean City's first automobile crossing.
Fact Jul 4, 1919 Ten thousand people and 1,185 automobiles come to Ocean City for the formal opening of the bay bridge on the Fourth of July.
Fact 1920 Ocean City had a smallpox outbreak in spring 1920 — 13 cases, and more than 1,000 people, "approximately 99.5 per cent of the entire population," vaccinated in about four days.
Fact 1920 The Fourteenth Census counts 711 people in Ocean City town — up 49% from 476 in 1910.
Fact 1920 1920: 32 more from the record
Fact Feb 5, 1920 "The worst storm in the history of this place" — on 5 February 1920 the ocean crossed the sandbar into Sinepuxent Bay for the first time in living memory, and Mayor Scott put the loss at $300,000.
Fact Feb 5, 1920 The February 1920 storm cut an inlet through the beach four miles south of Ocean City — thirteen years before the storm that cut the one that stayed.
Fact Feb 5, 1920 The February storm submerged the railroad's Sinepuxent bridge and stopped B.C.&A. trains at Berlin — while the year-old State Roads highway bridge stood undamaged.
Fact Apr 16, 1920 Chapter 382 of 1920 folded Ocean City's beach into the state's Bridge Loan — $250,000 of certificates, with whatever was left after the bridges to "protect Ocean City from the tides."
Fact Apr 23, 1920 Three months before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, Maryland re-enacted Ocean City's charter with the words "the male citizens of Ocean City" untouched — and set the town's election for the first Monday in August 1920.
Fact Jul 6, 1920 In July 1920 the B.C.&A. told the Public Service Commission it meant to stop Ocean City trains Nos. 7 and 8 after 28 August — and the town's three biggest hotels fought it.
Fact Oct 27, 1920 In October 1920 Man o' War came down the Delmarva railroad to winter near Ocean City, and crowds turned out at every station to see him.
Fact 1921 What the B.C.&A. actually did in 1921: it asked the Public Service Commission for permission to CUT its Baltimore-Ocean City fares, to fight the new bay ferries.
Fact 1921 Three days set apart for colored excursions to Ocean City, 12-14 September 1921 - two years earlier than any segregated excursion the record has held until now.
Fact 1921 A year on, the 1920 storm inlet is judged permanent - the bay has turned salt, oysters are growing up to the Ocean City bridge, and planters are staking ground.
Fact 1921 The Pennsylvania Railroad did not cover the B.C.&A.'s mortgage in 1921 - it REFUSED to advance funds, and bought the coupons off the bondholders instead.
Fact 1921 Ocean City has defied a State Board of Health order to build a new sewerage system since 1917, and in April 1921 goes to Baltimore to say it still cannot afford one.
Fact 1921 Naomi K. Workman, the Ocean City telephone operator who worked the switchboard on crutches for fifteen hours through the 1920 storm, is awarded the Theodore N. Vail medal.
Fact 1921 1921: 35 more from the record
Fact 1922 Ocean City has a natural inlet in 1922 — cut by the great storm of 1920 about two miles south of town, and by now salting the bay so well that the oyster men call it permanent.
Fact 1922 1922: 75 more from the record
Fact 1923 The Pennsylvania Railroad runs Ocean City excursions on separate days — "FOR WHITE PATRONS" on 1 August, "FOR COLORED PATRONS" on 12 September.
Fact 1923 1923: 45 more from the record
Fact Mar 31, 1923 Ocean City expects to pass $500,000 in building before the 1923 season opens — more construction in one winter than ever before.
Fact Mar 31, 1923 State police counted more than 6,000 motor vehicles entering Ocean City in a single day in the summer of 1922.
Fact Jun 25, 1923 The BC&A puts two gasoline motor cars on the Salisbury–Ocean City line — a railcar that looks and drives like a bus, run by two men instead of a train crew.
Fact Sep 28, 1923 The Mount Pleasant Hotel burns on 28 September with a $25,000 loss, and five fire companies keep the flames off the boardwalk.
Fact 1924 The State Roads Commission advertises for 'a timber jetty at the entrance of the Sinepuxent Bay two miles south of Ocean City.'
Fact 1924 The Pennsylvania Railroad runs its Ocean City excursion 'FOR WHITE PATRONS' on 6 August and 'FOR COLORED PATRONS' on 11 September — the 1923 pattern repeated exactly.
Fact 1924 1924: 42 more from the record
Lost 1925 Atlantic Hotel destroyed
Fact 1925 1925: 33 more from the record
Fact Jul 4, 1925 Ocean City turned fifty on 4 July 1925 and 35,000 people came — 5,600 cars from eighteen states, and two hundred who slept in them.
Fact Sep 16, 1925 Five thousand Black excursionists came to Ocean City in September 1925, and the railroad advertised the record: two arrests.
Era · range Dec 29, 1925 – Dec 29, 1925 The Great Fire (1925)
Fact Dec 29, 1925 The Great Fire: on Tuesday 29 December 1925 three blocks of ocean-front Ocean City burned, taking the Atlantic Hotel, the Seaside, the Pier, the Casino, Dolle's and the power plant.
Fact 1926 1926: 15 more from the record
Fact Jan 2, 1926 The first newspapers of 1926 count the cost of the fire that burned three blocks of Ocean City on 29 December 1925.
Fact Feb 13, 1926 Six weeks after the fire the county paper reports a building boom in the burnt district — and says the jetties are reclaiming the beach.
Fact Apr 3, 1926 A $1,500,000 development called Maridel Beach is laid out one mile north of Ocean City, sold on being higher than Ocean City and 'restricted as to class of purchasers'.
Fact Jul 1, 1926 The new Atlantic Hotel opens on 1 July 1926 with a hundred rooms — half the size of the one that burned.
Fact Jul 24, 1926 In July the Pennsylvania Railroad tells the Baltimore, Chesapeake & Atlantic it will buy no more of its bonds — and the county paper says the cause is trucks, buses and private cars.
Fact Jul 28, 1926 A three-state scheme for an ocean boulevard down the barrier beach from Lewes to Chincoteague costs Ocean City's inlet a $75,000 bridge — and Ocean City sits midway on six miles of concrete already built or building.
Fact Aug 7, 1926 Six years after the storm cut it, the opening south of town is 'Ocean City Inlet' on a three-state road map — and the man who owns Assateague says it cannot be kept open.
Fact Aug 24, 1926 For the third documented year running the Pennsylvania Railroad runs one excursion to Ocean City for white patrons and a separate one, weeks later and after Labor Day, for colored patrons.
Fact Sep 3, 1926 Ocean City does not rebuild its burnt power plant — it is wired to a transmission line from Laurel, Delaware, and gets forty electric ranges and an electric bakery.
Fact Sep 18, 1926 Elisha V. Bunting of the Ocean City Coast Guard station pulls five people out of the surf in one summer and the Carnegie Hero Fund sends a man to look at him.
Fact Dec 4, 1926 A $160,000 corporation is chartered in December to rebuild the pier on the old site, with a 1,000-seat theatre and bowling alleys.
Fact 1927 White patrons Tuesday 16 August, colored patrons Wednesday 14 September: the same beach, the same $1.98, four weeks and the end of the season apart.
Fact 1927 Chapter 304 pushes Ocean City's northern boundary out to North Twenty-sixth Street — the town's first limits change since 1904.
Fact 1927 The Baltimore, Chesapeake & Atlantic goes to foreclosure: ten bay steamers, the wharves and the Claiborne–Ocean City railroad to be sold.
Fact 1927 "Spend Your Easter In Ocean City, Md., At The NEW ATLANTIC HOTEL" — fifteen months after the fire, Dr. Purnell's rebuilt house is open, and open earlier than the old one ever was.
Fact 1927 Maryland commits $140,000 to dredge and scour the storm inlet south of Ocean City — five years before the storm that made the real one.
Fact 1927 The inlet the February 1920 storm cut is still open at the end of 1927 — three miles south of town, and silting shut.
Fact 1927 1927: 17 more from the record
Fact 1928 1928: 28 more from the record
Fact 1929 1929: 29 more from the record
Fact 1930 1930: 27 more from the record
Fact Jan 3, 1930 Coast Guardsmen under Capt. William Purnell take 1,850 cases of Canadian liquor on the beach four miles south of town — and by March forty men, thirty-six of them Ocean City residents, are indicted.
Fact Apr 7, 1930 Twenty-nine federal prisoners serve their sentences inside Ocean City's own municipal hall, marched to the Del-Mar-Va Hotel for meals, while the mayor petitions for their parole.
Fact Jun 18, 1930 Ocean City has a pier again — a 700-foot ocean fishing pier fronting Atlantic Avenue, on the site of the one the fire took, and by August a Washington paper calls it 900 feet.
Fact Sep 11, 1930 For a sixth documented year the Pennsylvania Railroad runs a separate advertised excursion to Ocean City "FOR COLORED PATRONS" — $1.98 from Tasley, Thursday 11 September, after Labor Day again.
Fact 1931 1931: 31 more from the record
Fact Feb 21, 1931 A February storm takes a 200-foot strip of Ocean City's beach into the ocean and very nearly cuts the inlet two and a half years early.
Fact Mar 13, 1931 An emergency act of 13 March lets Ocean City borrow up to $15,000 on notes — capped at the money its own citizens have not paid it.
Fact Apr 17, 1931 Maryland creates the $500,000 Ocean City Inlet Loan of 1931 — Chapter 511, approved 17 April.
Fact May 11, 1931 On 11 May 1931 the Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors scraps the old report and votes a complete new survey of the Sinepuxent inlet.
Fact Jul 8, 1931 Fifteen hundred firemen fill the Ocean City Pier Convention Hall, 8-10 July 1931 — the pier is not only standing, it is the town's assembly room.
Fact Sep 10, 1931 A seventh documented year of separate days: $1.98 to Ocean City "FOR COLORED PATRONS", Thursday 10 September 1931 — and no white excursion in the record.
Fact Oct 12, 1931 On the night of Monday 12 October 1931 Euel Lee is taken "in the negro section of Ocean City, Md.", and by Tuesday a mob of two thousand is round the Snow Hill jail.
Fact Oct 16, 1931 The state's witness is "a negro woman, Martha Harmon, 80, of Ocean City, whose place Jones had been known to frequent" — named, in 1931, as Harmon and not Miller.
Fact Nov 14, 1931 The Bank of Ocean City reopens on Saturday 14 November 1931 — the first closed Maryland bank to come back under the state's new guaranty-fund plan.
Fact 1932 1932: 14 more from the record
Fact Jan 20, 1932 Euel Lee, arrested at an Ocean City boarding house, is convicted at Towson of murdering the Davis family of Worcester County; the town's chief of police is accused in open court of planting the evidence.
Fact Mar 27, 1932 The Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors comes out against spending $640,000 on Ocean City Harbor and Sinepuxent Bay, and calls the town to a hearing to argue for it.
Fact Jun 12, 1932 Ocean City advertises itself in Washington as nineteen hotels with 2,225 beds — the first published capacity roll the campaign has for the town.
Fact Jun 18, 1932 The Chief of Engineers and the Secretary of War approve a $750,000 inlet from the Atlantic into Sinepuxent Bay — a reversal, three months after the Engineer Board opposed it.
Fact Jun 18, 1932 "1932 Rates 20% Lower Than 1931" — the George Washington Hotel, the largest in Ocean City, advertises the Depression on its own signboard.
Fact Jun 24, 1932 A strictly kosher hotel, the Shore Inn on Wicomico Street, advertises Ocean City to New York's Yiddish readers.
Fact Jul 5, 1932 Maryland's Court of Appeals throws out the Ocean City murder conviction because Black men had been excluded from the jury — and Black names go onto every jury list in the state.
Fact Aug 26, 1932 The Bank of Ocean City had closed its doors in the Depression and is one of ten Maryland state banks reopened by August 1932.
Fact Sep 27, 1932 "Aunt Martha", who kept a boarding house at Ocean City, is guarded overnight by Baltimore County police after being cursed and threatened outside the courthouse.
Fact Oct 29, 1932 A Carnegie hero medal for a rescue at Ocean City puts "life guards" on the Maryland beach in a contemporary source for the first time in this campaign.
Built 1933 Ocean City Inlet & Jetty created
Lost 1933 Train Depot Site destroyed
Event 1933 Trimper's Herschell-Spillman Carousel survived
Fact 1933 1933: 43 more from the record
Era · range Aug 22, 1933 – Aug 23, 1933 The 1933 Hurricane (Inlet Creation)
Fact Sep 14, 1933 14 September: the Public Works Administration allots $281,000, and the storm's hole becomes a federal harbour
Fact Oct 11, 1933 The storm took the railroad bridge; on 11 October the railway applied to give up passenger service, and the town did not object
Era · range 1934 – 1940 What the Storm Paid For (1934–1940)
Fact 1934 1934: 38 more from the record
Fact Jan 31, 1934 In January the mayor wrote to fourteen hundred fishing-boat owners from Massachusetts to the Carolinas to tell them Maryland now had a seaport
Fact Apr 2, 1934 The boardwalk the 1933 storm destroyed was rebuilt on a New Deal bargain: the town bought the lumber, the relief rolls supplied the men
Fact Jun 3, 1934 'A part of the sport-fishing fleet at Ocean City' — in June 1934 the Evening Star photographed a fleet that had not existed the year before, and named its flagship
Fact Jun 8, 1934 Fifteen hundred fishing vessels wanted a base at Ocean City — and the town's policy was to keep them out until the channel was done
Fact Sep 14, 1934 They tore up the abandoned Ocean City railroad and used its ties and rails to build the trestle that dumped the stone into the inlet
Fact Oct 23, 1934 October: the council resolved to ask the legislature for a $100,000 bond issue to build the town its own electric plant
Fact 1935 1935: 52 more from the record
Fact Mar 11, 1935 Ocean City told Washington it was afraid its new jetties would not hold, and the Chief of Engineers wrote back that they would
Fact Apr 29, 1935 The men who voted 104 to 1 for a sewer were, by law, property owners — the 1935 charter amendment says so
Fact May 17, 1935 Chapter 471 gave Ocean City everything it needed for a power station except a date — and the council never picked one
Fact May 25, 1935 The south jetty was finished on 25 May 1935, and the Corps counted every ton: 39,546.75 of core and 17,288.30 of cap
Fact Jul 26, 1935 Harry Hopkins signed off about eighty-nine thousand dollars of channels for Ocean City, and the town read it in a telegram
Fact Aug 27, 1935 In August 1935 the President approved a federal fishing harbor at Ocean City — the reversal of the policy that had kept the fleet out
Fact Aug 30, 1935 The inlet's authorised price was $870,000, and Maryland was down for $500,000 of it
Fact Oct 16, 1935 The United States offered Ocean City $49,909 and to buy $61,000 of its bonds, and the council took it the same night
Fact Nov 1, 1935 Ocean City voted 104 to 1 for a sewer
Fact Nov 2, 1935 The day after the vote the town issued sixty-one bonds and sold every one of them to the United States government
Fact 1936 1936: 57 more from the record
Fact Jun 1, 1936 The West Ocean City fishing harbour opened in June 1936: 3,250 feet long, ten feet deep, and the end of the town's policy of keeping the fleet out
Fact Aug 6, 1936 The Ocean City inlet was declared complete in August 1936 - at a controlling depth of five feet, half what was authorised
Fact Sep 18, 1936 On 18 September 1936 a hurricane took most of Ocean City's boardwalk, fifteen harbour-front homes and, for four hours, the town itself
Fact 1937 1937: 68 more from the record
Fact Jan 19, 1937 Seven weeks after Ordinance No. 55 the council put a figure on every ocean-front lot: $369.57 for fifty feet of twenty-four-foot boardwalk
Fact Mar 11, 1937 Ocean City rebuilt its two-mile boardwalk on eighteen-foot creosoted piling in a single winter, and the owners paid for it themselves rather than take federal money
Fact Apr 15, 1937 Ocean City's sewage plant went into operation in April 1937 with the first under-water sewage grinders in Maryland, and put the town's effluent into its own inlet
Fact Jun 8, 1937 On 8 June 1937 Ocean City accepted its sewage treatment plant, and the two-year job the town had voted 104 to 1 for was finished
Fact Jun 24, 1937 The rebuilt boardwalk cost $38,945.63 — and the ocean-front owners paid $17,377.92 of it, less than half
Fact Jun 30, 1937 By the end of fiscal 1937 the Ocean City inlet had cost $966,689.73 — and half of it was money Maryland put up itself
Fact Sep 7, 1937 On 7 September 1937 the council granted Chas. Henry a permit to build an addition to his property at Baltimore Avenue and South Division Street
Fact Sep 9, 1937 The third county paper printed what the other two did not: Ocean City voted four to one for the old bridge site, and the mayor led one of the factions
Fact Sep 9, 1937 Ocean City voted 275 to 97 for Worcester Street as the landing of its new highway bridge, and Congress had already written the choice into federal law
Fact Oct 14, 1937 A second Black hotel was being prepared on Baltimore Avenue for the 1938 season, and the paper located it by the colored dance hall next door
Fact Nov 18, 1937 Ocean City's Black hotel appears on the mayor's own 1937 building list: 'Chas. Henry Hotel for Negroes, $1,500'
Fact Nov 24, 1937 Sportsmen took a million pounds of fish out of Ocean City in the summer of 1937 from a fleet of fifty-two boats, and the mayor did the arithmetic himself
Fact Dec 30, 1937 Four months after Ocean City voted 275 to 97 for Worcester Street, the state said the vote was not binding and the bridge would go somewhere else
Fact Dec 31, 1937 In December 1937 the Ocean City inlet was sounded at 9.3 feet — the deepest it ever got, and the figure the Corps still quoted two years later
Fact Dec 31, 1937 Ocean City's inlet carried 6,942 tons in 1937 — nearly double 1936 — but the cargo was worth 38 per cent less and the passengers halved
Fact 1938 1938: 37 more from the record
Fact Apr 4, 1938 In April 1938 a man applied to Ocean City for a permit to build a Colored Recreation Hall, and the neighbours objected before the council had said a word
Fact May 10, 1938 Ordinance No. 100 forbade cesspools and privies anywhere in Ocean City, and the town went after the shanties first
Fact Jun 6, 1938 Nine months after voting four to one for Worcester Street, Ocean City signed away North Division and Caroline Streets for the new bridge instead
Fact Jun 30, 1938 Ocean City's inlet cost $982,177.72 by June 1938 and the Corps spent only $15,487.99 on it that year - the cheapest year since the storm
Fact Jul 27, 1938 On 27 July 1938 Ocean City handed Philadelphia Avenue north of Ninth Street to the State of Maryland, and the Coastal Highway was born out of a town street
Fact Aug 1, 1938 Ocean City turned out its mayor of four years in August 1938 and elected its own lawyer, on 323 votes cast between two o'clock and six
Fact Aug 15, 1938 Three hundred people packed the Ocean City Pier convention hall in August 1938 for a War Department hearing on the bridge, and twelve of them spoke against it
Fact Sep 15, 1938 Thirty-nine Black excursionists rode to Ocean City in the backs of two trucks on 15 September 1938, and three of them were killed when the trucks met on the Newark curve
Fact Sep 16, 1938 A second account of the 1938 crash says it was two trucks, and that it could not learn the dead woman's name
Fact Nov 22, 1938 On 22 November 1938 Ocean City's council unanimously refused a permit for a Colored Recreation Hall, after six named white neighbours objected
Fact 1939 1939: 21 more from the record
Fact Jan 17, 1939 The first item of Ocean City business about a named Black resident in 1939 was what to do with an old man the town wanted institutionalised
Fact Jun 2, 1939 Ocean City put a price on thirty-five kinds of business in 1939, and the General Assembly had to give it the power first
Fact Jun 6, 1939 Ocean City's permit machinery in 1939: notify every owner within 250 feet, set a hearing, and see who turns up
Fact Jun 21, 1939 The Henry Hotel added six hundred dollars' worth of building in 1939, and the town's new-assessment list is the only place it is written down
Fact Jun 30, 1939 The Ocean City inlet was sounded at ten feet in June 1939 - the deepest it has ever been recorded
Fact Sep 1, 1939 Two governors were to dedicate the Ocean City beach road on 1 September 1939. It was called off because eight miles of Maryland were not finished
Fact Oct 3, 1939 The same council that refused the Colored Recreation Hall refused a white man's building on 9th Street in 1939 - and had granted him one in March
Fact Oct 27, 1939 In October 1939 the Baltimore & Eastern Railroad sold nine-tenths of an acre of Ocean City to the United States for $7,500
Fact Dec 11, 1939 Ocean City's last council meeting of 1939 ended with the mayor telling them he would have to resign
Fact 1940 1940: 21 more from the record
Fact Jan 2, 1940 Ocean City's council filled the mayor's chair from among itself in a single afternoon sitting, and the man who took it was the man who had been chairing the meeting
Fact Jan 15, 1940 Thirteen days into the new mayor's term Ocean City repealed the ordinance that had handed the State the beds of North Division and Caroline Streets for its new bridge
Fact Apr 1, 1940 All sixty-two sheets of the 1940 census for Ocean City and West Ocean City have now been read, and they show what the town's minute book never says: Black households living inside the corporate limits, street by street, alongside white ones.
Fact Apr 1, 1940 Stella Bowen worked fifty-two weeks in 1939 for $175; the man she kept house for worked twenty-six for $520
Fact Apr 1, 1940 The 1940 census names Black Ocean City at last - three households of their own on the last block of South Division Street, between the street and the Inlet
Fact Jun 30, 1940 The Ocean City inlet's costs were never contradictory: the campaign had been comparing two columns of the same table, one with the State's $500,000 in it and one without
Fact Aug 5, 1940 Ocean City's 1940 election was decided by one vote: the third council seat went to Robert Lee Cropper on 128 against Frank Salea's 127
Fact Sep 30, 1940 Ten feet held: the Ocean City inlet was sounded again in September 1940 and came out at 10.0 feet, with no dredging in either year
Fact Oct 16, 1940 Two hundred and eighty-eight Ocean City men registered for the draft on 16 October 1940, out of 2,647 in Worcester County
Fact Nov 29, 1940 At its last meeting of 1940 Ocean City instructed its lawyer to argue for a State jetty running from the Inlet up to South Division Street, to protect the south beach
Era · range 1941 – 1945 The War Years (1941–1945)
Fact 1941 1941: 31 more from the record
Fact Dec 8, 1941 Ocean City's new bridge — 2,295 feet of concrete and steel, landing at North Division Street — was completed on 8 December 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, and then stood closed for eleven months.
Fact Dec 11, 1941 Four days after Pearl Harbor and on the day Germany declared war, the Ocean City council sat down and organised a home defence council — eleven departments, twenty-two names, and a Department of Evacuation.
Fact Dec 22, 1941 On 22 December 1941 gunfire offshore shook the houses of Ocean City for an hour and a half and was heard eight miles inland at Berlin. The Coast Guard would not comment.
Fact 1942 1942: 15 more from the record
Fact Jan 9, 1942 Worcester County taught its people what to do in an air raid at seven meetings on one January night in 1942 — four for whites and three for the colored, and Ocean City was the only town of the four that got a white meeting and no colored one.
Fact Mar 13, 1942 The U.S. Navy cleared Ocean City's boats to go on fishing in 1942 — the Coast Guard would inspect every marlin boat for seaworthiness first, and most of them were already enrolled in the auxiliary.
Fact Apr 2, 1942 On the night of 2 April 1942 U-552 shelled the American freighter David H. Atwater to pieces twenty miles off Ocean City, and by the next evening thirteen of her dead were lying at the Ocean City Coast Guard Station.
Fact Apr 3, 1942 On the night of 3 April 1942 — with thirteen dead men from a shelled freighter lying at its Coast Guard station — Ocean City was plunged into total darkness by an order that was never meant for the town at all.
Fact Apr 10, 1942 Nine days after the sinking the Governor of Maryland told a women's club near Baltimore that the bodies of thirteen seamen had been taken to Ocean City, and that they were shot down in cold blood in their lifeboats.
Fact May 2, 1942 Ocean City's air-raid wardens had to argue the council into it, and then the town passed a blackout ordinance on a Saturday night in May and put a man on the payroll at forty dollars a week to screen the lights.
Fact May 8, 1942 The Army dimmed out the Maryland coast in May 1942 to stop U-boats silhouetting ships against it — and inside Ocean City and Fenwick Island a car could show nothing but its parking lights.
Fact Jun 26, 1942 Clarence Edward Pitts of Ocean City was accepted into the armed forces in June 1942 — the first Black resident of the town the campaign has found named in a contemporary wartime record.
Fact Sep 11, 1942 On 11 September 1942 the Ocean City council resolved to stop the autumn's 'colored days' — and gave the dim-out, rubber and gasoline as its reasons.
Fact 1943 1943: 28 more from the record
Fact 1944 1944: 25 more from the record
Fact Aug 7, 1944 Ocean City cast 452 votes on 7 August 1944, turned out its wartime mayor and both sitting councilmen, and made Daniel Trimper Jr. mayor.
Fact Sep 15, 1944 The hurricane of 14 September 1944 wrecked enough of Ocean City's Boardwalk that the council met at ten the next morning to board it off and nail up signs to keep people away.
Fact Sep 25, 1944 Ocean City granted its 1945 rolling-chair concession on the written condition that the chairs be rolled by competent men and 'for White people only'.
Fact Nov 14, 1944 Ocean City's businessmen wrote against a Colored rooming house on the Nancy Truitt property, and the council asked the applicant to withdraw it and apply for white only.
Fact Nov 14, 1944 On 14 November 1944 Ocean City asked its attorney to draft a building and zoning ordinance - the beginning of the town's zoning, four years after it first discussed the idea.
Fact 1945 1945: 31 more from the record
Fact May 10, 1945 Ocean City's first Zoning Commission organised on 10 May 1945 with Frank Waller as president and Dr. C. W. Purnell as secretary.
Fact May 22, 1945 Clarence Carey came before the Ocean City council about the Colored dance hall in May 1945 and was told the town "were not after the Colored places any more than the White, but wanted better order at both".
Fact Oct 22, 1945 The first thing Ocean City zoning did was decide where a night club could stand, and the first response to it was a request to change the classification.
Fact Nov 5, 1945 Ocean City voted on 5 November 1945 to widen its Boardwalk to thirty feet from North Division to South Division Street.
Fact Nov 20, 1945 Ocean City's first zoning ordinance ran to thirty-eight pages, was read aloud in a single afternoon, and was signed over to the council after a steak dinner at City Lunch.
Fact 1946 1946: 51 more from the record
Fact Apr 25, 1946 Ocean City's rebuilt Boardwalk cost the town $18.00 a running foot and the abutting owners were billed $15.50 - $775 for a fifty-foot lot.
Fact May 7, 1946 Ocean City's two business zones were not general and special but closed and conditional: in a B district a night club, dance hall, penny arcade or amusement park was flatly prohibited, and only in a BB district could the Board of Zoning Appeals ever allow one.
Fact May 7, 1946 Ocean City's power to zone came from Chapter 787 of the Acts of 1945 - Senate Bill 335, approved 27 April 1945 as an emergency law written for Ocean City alone.
Fact May 7, 1946 Ocean City passed its first zoning ordinance 3-0 on the evening of 7 May 1946, and it was in force that night.
Fact May 7, 1946 The 1946 zoning map ran from the Inlet to North 26th Street and stopped dead: everything platted beyond it was drawn, left blank and unzoned.
Fact May 28, 1946 Ocean City wrote its own boundaries into the minute book on 28 May 1946, back to a deed of 1876, declared North Division Street to be 75 feet and not the 77 its founding plat showed, and gave away everything north of the corrected line.
Fact Aug 5, 1946 Ocean City returned its whole government at a four-hour poll in the fire house on 5 August 1946: Trimper beat Robert Lee Cropper 344 to 135, and the three sitting councilmen all beat the only challenger.
Fact Aug 27, 1946 Twenty-two days after being re-elected, the President of the Ocean City Council laid a note on the table resigning both his remaining term and his new one, and walked out of a meeting that had never been called to order.
Fact Nov 26, 1946 By the end of 1946 the man who had lost the mayoralty in August was building Ocean City an airport a mile and a half from the Boardwalk, and the town handed the federal aviation authority over to him.
Fact 1947 A Worcester jury took five minutes to acquit a nineteen-year-old white man of clubbing a Black sailor to death outside a tavern
Fact 1947 1947: 15 more from the record
Fact 1948 1948: 9 more from the record
Fact Nov 1, 1948 After two men were killed near Berlin within twelve hours, the county paper editorialised that "a hanging for each murder committed" would instil the fear of the law
Fact 1949 1949: 9 more from the record
Fact 1950 1950: 10 more from the record
Fact 1951 1951: 12 more from the record
Era · range 1952 – 1970 Post-War Boom (1950s–1960s)
Fact 1952 1952: 6 more from the record
Fact 1953 1953: 6 more from the record
Fact Jun 4, 1953 A Washington contractor signed to build a 3,000-foot Sinepuxent Bay bridge to Ocean Beach on Assateague, after a fight in the Legislature forced a $200,000 performance bond
Fact 1954 1954: 5 more from the record
Fact Oct 15, 1954 Hurricane Hazel crossed on 15 October at 100 miles an hour, killing two in Worcester County — among them a 13-year-old girl struck by a falling tree limb at her own home
Fact 1955 1955: 6 more from the record
Fact Sep 22, 1955 Ocean City refused a permit for a $5,000,000 amusement pier and convention hall at 15th Street, on the ground that the site was not a business zone
Fact 1956 1956: 7 more from the record
Fact 1957 1957: 8 more from the record
Fact May 28, 1957 Ocean City annexed the ground from 26th Street to 41st Street, unanimously, after asking the State whether annexation would compel it to provide water and sewer
Fact 1958 1958: 7 more from the record
Fact Dec 4, 1958 The State Health Department blocked the Assateague development on sanitary grounds — and the filing reveals the scale intended: about 3,600 lots
Fact 1959 1959: 6 more from the record
Fact Jul 2, 1959 "Behind The Closed Doors" — the county paper accused the Worcester Commissioners of shutting the public out of their own government
Fact 1960 1960: 6 more from the record
Fact Dec 29, 1960 An Ocean City beverage dealer paid $600 for a licence where the rest of Worcester County paid $1,500 — and the mayor called the reform of it a scheme
Fact 1961 1961: 8 more from the record
Era 1962 The 1962 Ash Wednesday Storm
Fact 1962 1962: 14 more from the record
Fact Mar 6, 1962 Ocean City's mayor urged every citizen to evacuate the town on the Tuesday of the Ash Wednesday storm
Fact 1963 1963: 5 more from the record
Fact May 30, 1963 Two years before the National Seashore bill, Rogers C. B. Morton said the federal government must not take Assateague over the State's objection — the initiative had to come from Maryland
Fact 1964 1964: 8 more from the record
Fact Feb 25, 1964 The council refused to join the Sanitary Commission because building the sewer first would destroy any reason for the north to be annexed
Fact 1965 1965: 6 more from the record
Fact Jan 12, 1965 One hundred and six eligible voters extended Ocean City to the Delaware line, in a referendum forced by the opponents of annexation
Fact Jan 14, 1965 Morton introduced the Assateague Island National Seashore bill in January and the House passed it in September — eighteen years of promotion, a bonded bridge and thousands of conveyed lots ending as a park
Fact 1966 1966: 6 more from the record
Fact Apr 28, 1966 The State appropriated $1,250,000 for a convention hall at Ocean City, on condition that the town supply the land
Fact 1967 1967: 16 more from the record
Fact 1968 1968: 6 more from the record
Fact Apr 11, 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed on 4 April and Baltimore burned from the 6th; in the issues read, it never reaches the county paper's front page — it reaches page nine as a signed column and page five as one line of Ironshire social news
Fact 1969 1969: 5 more from the record
Fact Aug 7, 1969 The county's own centenary account of the Civil War used "Under Ground Rail Road" to mean the route south to the Confederacy, and reprinted it in 1969 without comment
Fact 1970 1970: 6 more from the record
Fact Feb 18, 1970 The wetlands bill Senator Malkus killed in 1969 returned as a Shorelines Planning bill extending State control to all land within 300 feet of any navigable water — in a county made of water
Fact Apr 18, 1970 The Ocean City Convention Hall was dedicated on 18 April 1970 with two governors on the platform and the mayor who had spent a decade asking
Fact 1971 1971: 7 more from the record
Fact 1972 1972: 23 more from the record
Fact May 1, 1972 One high-rise existed before July 1971; seven were under construction by May 1972, with over 2,000 apartment and condominium dwellings built in fifteen months — in a town of 1,600 to 1,800 residents
Fact Dec 12, 1972 James B. Coulter, Secretary of Natural Resources, told the council in a verbatim special session that there are storms that made Ocean City and storms that will take the whole works away
Fact 1973 1973: 22 more from the record
Fact Jan 17, 1973 Five weeks after Secretary Coulter asked the town to put its building line behind the dune line, the Board of Natural Resources was suing — and the town said the suits had killed a $3 million beach purchase
Fact 1974 1974: 19 more from the record
Fact Feb 18, 1974 The ordinance that replaced Ocean City's old height limit does not cap height — above 45 feet it charges for it, one extra foot of side yard for every five feet of height
Fact 1975 1975: 22 more from the record
Fact Mar 17, 1975 The three-year fight over the beach ended in Annapolis with two Senate bills, a million dollars, seven blocks conceded and the deeds — with Steny Hoyer, then a state senator, in the room
Fact 1976 1976: 20 more from the record
Fact Jan 5, 1976 Ocean City decided against casinos in the same year Atlantic City decided for them, and the decision took eleven minutes at the end of a January meeting
Fact 1977 1977: 21 more from the record
Fact Feb 7, 1977 The winter of 1976–77 froze the Chesapeake and broke Ocean City's water system, and the mayor accounted for it by refusing to let one man work a hundred hours
Fact 1978 1978: 18 more from the record
Fact Apr 12, 1978 In a joint session with the Park Service and the Corps of Engineers, the loss of northern Assateague was stated on the record as "the recession of the island as a result of the jetty system"
Fact 1979 1979: 18 more from the record
Fact Mar 19, 1979 The police budget went from $250,000 to over a million in under eight years, from a force with four cars, no raise in five years, and men on $75 or $85
Fact 1980 1980: 17 more from the record
Fact Jan 21, 1980 The Atlantic undermined the oceanfront beam of Eighty-One Beach Hill, threatening the parking slab beneath it — and the town's answer was a permission slip for blocks and flashing
Fact 1981 1981: 21 more from the record
Fact 1982 1982: 19 more from the record
Fact Apr 5, 1982 The erosion the 1978 joint session had blamed on the jetties acquired a plan — the Trident Report — and with it the shape of every coastal deal that follows: the State builds it and the town maintains it
Fact 1983 1983: 17 more from the record
Fact Feb 21, 1983 Resolution 1983-1 put Atlantic City into a formal resolution to prove a resort must never stop building — the same city Kelley had cited eight years earlier to prove a resort must never let itself rot
Fact 1984 1984: 18 more from the record
Fact Mar 5, 1984 Thirty-five million paid up in taxes, one million asked back for the beach, and Governor Hughes whipping his own agencies against it
Fact 1985 1985: 21 more from the record
Fact Feb 21, 1985 Harry Kelley died in office after fifteen years as mayor, and the council voted unanimously to pay for his funeral in a special session that also required a budget amendment
Era · range 1986 – 1987 Getting the Easements (1986–1987)
Fact 1986 1986: 17 more from the record
Fact Feb 3, 1986 The State budget carried $700,000 for beach replenishment — the point at which Ocean City's beach stopped being something the sea maintained and became something the State buys
Fact 1987 1987: 29 more from the record
Fact Feb 16, 1987 The City Manager put the beach's own costs at $2,177,213 and proposed that parking meters carry them, including the $500,000 a year the finished replenishment would need
Fact Jun 1, 1987 The council attached the beach easement to the one thing developers wanted most: no height exception would be granted until the applicant had recorded one
Fact Nov 2, 1987 Ocean City's voters rejected collective bargaining 446 to 1,171 and struck down the town's own height ordinance 495 to 1,122 on the same day
Fact 1988 1988: 19 more from the record
Fact Apr 4, 1988 Councilman Hurley explained in open session why the town had said nothing for two years: the environmental groups maintain "we are stealing the sand that was meant for Assateague"
Fact 1989 1989: 19 more from the record
Fact May 15, 1989 Two million dollars a year, put in jointly by the City, County and State, into a standing fund for a beach that must be rebuilt forever
Fact 1990 1990: 19 more from the record
Fact Sep 25, 1990 FEMA told the council the replenished beach and its new dune could convert oceanfront land out of the V Zone into ordinary floodplain — and waived its own waiting period to do it
Fact 1991 1991: 22 more from the record
Fact 1992 1992: 17 more from the record
Fact Jan 14, 1992 The January nor'easter was not a disaster, because the beach absorbed it: "The beach replenishment project should fall under the beach maintenance fund. The damage to the Town itself was not significant enough to be categorized as a disaster."
Fact 1993 1993: 18 more from the record
Fact May 17, 1993 The Supreme Court's beachfront takings case was read aloud in Ocean City eleven months after it was decided, over a twenty-foot strip of the Jolly Roger property — and a citizen took the City Solicitor apart from the floor
Fact 1994 1994: 17 more from the record
Fact Apr 12, 1994 DNR asked half a million for beach replenishment, the committee removed it, one senator put $250,000 back — and the town voted 7-0 to write two letters, one angry and one grateful
Fact 1995 1995: 18 more from the record
Fact Apr 1, 1995 The town borrowed to double a convention centre that loses money, because a $1.4 million loss shared with Annapolis is smaller than the $824,000 loss it already carried alone
Fact 1996 1996: 18 more from the record
Fact Jan 3, 1996 The town was formally reprimanded by the Open Meetings Compliance Board for ordering an ordinance in closed session — and the ordinance reached the council's packet without reaching its agenda
Fact 1997 Ridership rose 113 per cent to 2,543,793 after the 1991 dollar all-day pass — and Ocean City makes the largest local government contribution of any transit system in Maryland, with only 10 per cent of operating costs covered by federal and state aid against 38 to 65 per cent elsewhere
Fact 1997 1997: 18 more from the record
Fact 1998 1998: 17 more from the record
Fact Jan 2, 1998 A referendum petition of 1,353 signatures fell to 1,158 after the Board struck 132 as unregistered, 42 as duplicates and 20 as out-of-town — and a councilman appealed it name by name
Fact 1999 In its own All-America City application the town wrote that annexing to attract development "placed the community on the brink of bankruptcy"
Fact 1999 1999: 17 more from the record
Fact 2000 2000: 18 more from the record
Fact 2001 2001: 26 more from the record
Fact 2002 2002: 17 more from the record
Fact Feb 11, 2002 Ocean City's case against the Atlantic Coastal Bays Protection Act was argued by a member of the programme's own scientific committee, who made it by describing how he forced a correction out of the Baltimore Sun
Fact Oct 15, 2002 On 15 October 2002 Ocean City's voters approved a charter amendment making the collective-bargaining prohibition inapplicable to the police department — fifteen years after they had voted to keep it
Fact 2003 The condominium boom stopped producing tax base and started eating the town's commerce, and the Planning Commission moved to bar residential development from every commercial district
Fact 2003 2003: 21 more from the record
Fact 2004 2004: 18 more from the record
Fact Apr 8, 2004 Twenty-seven years of Eagle's Landing read into the record in one session: land acquired with FAA and MAA help specifically for a cross-wind runway, then used for a golf course on an "interim" basis for fifteen years
Fact 2005 2005: 17 more from the record
Fact Jun 6, 2005 A food bank told the council that the international students who work Ocean City's season are among those it feeds, and asked for a small stipend and an office
Era · range 2006 – 2015 Bedrooms (2006–2015)
Fact 2006 The Planning Director stopped his own Commission mid-vote to remind it that Maryland law lets it rezone only on a finding of change in the neighbourhood or mistake in the original zoning
Fact 2006 2006: 16 more from the record
Fact Apr 4, 2006 Six lieutenants and captains won a declaration that the labour code violated the charter, and on 4 April 2006 the Court of Special Appeals took it away — a referendum is the wrong instrument for a technical question
Fact 2007 2007: 18 more from the record
Fact Jun 12, 2007 A town whose product is sunlight wrote the sun into its zoning code — a shadow test with a season, a window of hours, and a hypothetical roof to measure against
Fact 2008 2008: 25 more from the record
Fact Feb 4, 2008 After thirty-two years of refusing gambling, Ocean City's Mayor and Council voted 6-1 to support five slot machines in fraternal non-profit halls
Fact 2009 2009: 18 more from the record
Fact Jan 13, 2009 $321,301 of policing to host one year's events — Bike Week at $66,772, the Good Friday Cross Walk and the Mayor's Open House at exactly $198 each
Fact 2010 2010: 18 more from the record
Fact Jan 12, 2010 Seven years of Homeland Security work presented to the council opens with a list of what someone might attack: beach, boardwalk, water and waste water plants, convention centre, city hall, public safety building, special events
Fact 2011 2011: 22 more from the record
Fact Aug 26, 2011 Hurricane Irene forces the first full mandatory evacuation of Ocean City since Hurricane Gloria in 1985.
Fact 2012 2012: 17 more from the record
Fact Nov 8, 2012 The general employees' collective-bargaining amendment was defeated 931 to 1,723 — the third time Ocean City's voters were asked, and the second time they said no
Fact Dec 4, 2012 Hurricane Sandy enters Ocean City's own record five weeks late, as evidence in a conditional use hearing on a Delmarva Power substation — cited by the utility against burying power lines and by a former councilman for the opposite conclusion
Fact 2013 2013: 17 more from the record
Fact Jan 7, 2013 Ten weeks after the largest Atlantic storm in living memory, the town's whole recorded relationship with it is a federal loan deadline three days away and rubbish washing up on the beach
Fact 2014 2014: 17 more from the record
Fact Jan 21, 2014 The oldest project in this record — making the summer longer — reaches its most ambitious form: a town of seven thousand lobbying Annapolis to change when every school in Maryland starts
Fact 2015 2015: 17 more from the record
Fact Jun 9, 2015 Ocean City had been governing its floodplain by a map drawn in March 1986 — before the easements, before the dredges, before the dune existed — and in 2015 adopted a wholly new one
Era · range 2016 – 2025 The Horizon (2016–2025)
Fact 2016 2016: 21 more from the record
Fact 2017 2017: 18 more from the record
Fact Nov 15, 2017 Phase 3 of the convention centre costs $34.4 million — eleven times the original building — and is still being paid for by the food tax created to pay for it
Fact 2018 2018: 19 more from the record
Fact May 29, 2018 The State made nuisance flooding planning compulsory, and the town gave the parts of itself that go under first a name: "Downtown First-to-Flood Areas"
Fact 2019 2019: 21 more from the record
Fact Oct 16, 2019 The first passage in this corpus that counts the town's poor: forty homeless people identified, twenty-four of them not housed — and it arose because Public Works staff asked for help
Fact 2020 2020: 20 more from the record
Fact Jun 11, 2020 COVID-19 did not reach this council as debate but as a Department Activity Report — eleven news organisations, a governor, a graduation and a protest, in one fortnight of the mayor's office
Fact 2021 2021: 25 more from the record
Fact 2022 2022: 18 more from the record
Fact Jan 12, 2022 A hundred and forty-six turbines, the nearest twelve miles out — and Ocean City's objection, that you will be able to see them, lost before the Public Service Commission despite "our visual expert"
Fact 2023 2023: 17 more from the record
Fact Jul 17, 2023 Having lost before the Public Service Commission, Ocean City escalated to the federal level and bought the expertise: $175,500 for peer review of the US Wind construction and operations plan
Fact 2024 2024: 19 more from the record
Fact May 6, 2024 The sports complex operator was scored on how many hotel rooms it fills — "Produces over 50,000 room nights annually" is the fourth criterion, above organisational development
Fact 2025 Thirty-eight years after the voters rejected collective bargaining 446 to 1,171, the Mayor and Council ratified a three-year contract with the Fraternal Order of Police — unanimously
Fact 2025 2025: 16 more from the record
before 1850 1850–1920 1920–1980 1980–present
Independent, unaffiliated guide to Ocean City, MD. Details change seasonally — verify before you go. About · Sources
OCMD Explorer — an independent guide to Ocean City, Maryland. Every claim is sourced; see the colophon.