Maridel Beach City

In the record (5)

1. 1926 · 1926-04-03

   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'.

   Worcester Democrat, 3 April 1926: the company behind 'building sites for a proposed new resort north of Ocean City' has revived a project that had 'relaxed', and will open offices in Ocean City, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia and Wilmington. 'C. H. Shude and C. E. Shude, of Ocean City are president and secretary respectively... The other officers are: Daniel Richardson, Norfolk, director of sales; A. H. Abbott, Berlin, and T. A. Rudell, of Ocean City, district sales directors. The development will be called the Maridel Beach City and the title to the property will be guaranteed by the Baltimore Trust Company... Stringent restrictions will be placed upon the prospective building to be erected on the sites, the sales contracts permitting the use of only stone, brick, stucco or similar construction material.' Full-page advertisements ran through May, June and July in the Worcester Democrat and the Milford Chronicle: 'MARIDEL BEACH — One Mile North of Ocean City, Maryland — A New City by the Sea'; five miles of ocean-and-bay frontage; a concrete highway by Slacum, Brohawn & Woolford of Cambridge, built to Maryland State specifications; 'Concrete sidewalks, and curbing, water mains, grading and a four-mile boardwalk along the ocean front are other features included in the prices of the lots'; 'Every lot is sold with the guarantee that it is higher above sea level than Ocean City, Maryland'; 'No frame buildings'; and — printed as a selling point beside the golf and the tennis — 'Only large beach on the coast restricted as to class of purchasers.' PART-ANSWERED 2026-08-06: something WAS built. One of the three opened links of the Del-Mar-Va ocean boulevard is 'at Maridel Beach, north of Ocean City' by April 1928 — so at least the promised concrete highway was laid and opened. What is still unknown is whether anything else was: houses, lots sold, anyone living there.

   C. H. Shude

   Source · checked 2026-08-06

2. 1928 · 1928-04-25

   South Ocean City is to build two miles of concrete toward the inlet — the fourth link of the three-state ocean boulevard, on a hundred-foot strip its owners gave away.

   Smyrna Times, 25 April 1928, under "PLAN NEW LINK OCEAN ROAD — South Ocean City to Build Two Miles on the Three-State Boulevard": "The fourth link of concrete highway in the proposed Del-Mar-Va Ocean boulevard, extending 80 miles southward from Lewes, Del., through Maryland to Chincoteague Island, Va., is being planned for construction in South Ocean City in the form of a two-mile hard surfaced road. The new highway will connect with the southern end of Baltimore avenue, Ocean City's principal thoroughfare, and extend south in the direction of the Natural Inlet. A strip of property, 100 feet wide and extending thru the central section of South Ocean City for two miles, has been given by its owners for the proposed road. The completion of this new link will give Maryland about six miles of improved highway along its 35-mile ocean front. Already three links in the proposed boulevard have been opened, one at Bethany Beach, Del.; one at Rehoboth Beach, Del., and the third at Maridel Beach, north of Ocean City. In the course of a few years, other links will be built in the three States, until eventually, the entire 80-mile highway is completed. One of the features of the proposed boulevard for Worcester county is that it will shorten the distance from Wilmington and Philadelphia to these [resorts]."

   Three things fall out of one paragraph. The 1926 boulevard from Lewes to Chincoteague was not just talk: by April 1928 three links are open. Maridel Beach — the 1926 land-boom scheme a mile north that sold elevation and 'restriction as to class of purchasers' — is one of the three, so something was actually built there. And the 1920 storm cut is still on the map in 1928 under the name the 1926 papers gave it, the Natural Inlet, with a road being aimed at it. That is eight years open, five years before the storm that made the famous one.

   Del-Mar-Va Eastern Shore Association

   Source · checked 2026-08-06

3. 1929

   Maridel Beach City survives the land boom, barely: a $5,000 power line to it is on Ocean City's autumn building list, and that is its only appearance in the year.

   The $1,500,000 development laid out in 1926 a mile north of Ocean City — five miles of ocean and bay frontage, a promised four-mile boardwalk, and lots advertised as 'restricted as to class of purchasers' — leaves almost no trace in the 1929 record. It appears once, in the Smyrna Times list of the town's projected autumn works: '$5,000 power line to Maridel Beach'. A phrase query for 'Maridel' across the whole of Chronicling America for 1929 returns sixteen pages, of which that list is the only Delmarva one; the rest are a Wyoming weekly, an Ohio daily and a New York stock table in which 'Manati Sugar' OCRs as 'Maridel Bros'.

   Three years after the plats and the guaranteed titles, Maridel Beach City is a place you run a wire to. It is not nothing — something out there wanted electricity — but it is a long way from $1,500,000 of improvements, and the name never became a town.

   Source · checked 2026-08-06

4. 1929

   Five weeks before the Crash, Mayor McCabe puts the summer's net receipts at $1,250,000 and forecasts a winter building boom: a $300,000 boardwalk hotel, a wider boardwalk, a $50,000 Playland and a $115,000 amusement hall on the new pier.

   A Delaware weekly of 25 September 1929 printed the whole of what Ocean City meant to build that autumn and winter. Permits were already in at the mayor and council's office for several new summer cottages and one boardwalk hotel costing about $300,000. Thomas H. Conway and Joseph Bryant, owners of the burned Playland, announced a new and larger one at $50,000; the Rapoport Brothers of Philadelphia, whose properties burned, also meant to rebuild, and several smaller places already had. The town planned to rebuild the boardwalk in the amusement section eighteen feet wider, to build a $20,000 bulkhead on the ocean front in north Ocean City near the Catholic Home — a site 'which 50 years ago was the site of an inlet between Ocean City and the Sinepuxent Bay' — and probably to rebuild the sewer system, especially the outlet lines, doing it properly being estimated at $100,000. Also listed: a $2,000 swimming pool at the New Atlantic Hotel, a $5,000 power line to Maridel Beach, $60,000 of new summer cottages, and a $115,000 pier and amusement hall at the shore end of the new pier, to start that fall and be finished for the opening of the 1930 season. Mayor McCabe put the town's net receipts for the summer just ended at $1,250,000.

   This is the high-water mark of the boom, and it is dated by the calendar rather than by anything the town did. Read beside the fire of three weeks earlier it is defiance; read beside 29 October it is a list of things about to be tested. Note also the aside about the bulkhead site — an inlet at the north end of Ocean City in about 1879, a claim no other source in this campaign makes.

   Ocean City BoardwalkAtlantic HotelOcean City Fishing PierSinepuxent Pier and Improvement CompanyWilliam W. McCabeThomas H. ConwayJoseph Bryant

   Source · checked 2026-08-06

5. 1933 · 1933-11-08

   Maridel Beach reappears — as the point where Maryland's coastal highway stopped in 1927 and stayed stopped

   After four researched years of silence, the Maridel Beach City development surfaces in a Delaware account of the coastal boulevard: 'In 1927 Worcester County, Maryland, advocates of the boulevard brought about the construction of two miles of concrete highway from Ocean City northward toward the Delaware line to Maridel Beach, the name given a new ocean front development… and [Maryland] has made no addition' since. Delaware had by 1933 surveyed and bought right of way to carry its own boulevard six miles south from Bethany Beach to the state line at Fenwick Island; Maryland had six miles left to build, at around $90,000, and the storm made it urgent — 'the need for another highway outlet from Ocean City, Md., has made the matter an emergency one.' Mayor McCabe, who was chairman of the Maryland Waterfront Commission, had said in February that the state stood ready to spend $100,000 on its share out of Worcester County's post-lateral highway allotment from the gas tax.

   William W. McCabe

   Source · checked 2026-08-10