Maryland State Conservation Commission
government · active 1920
The state's fisheries and game authority, whose members spent the spring of 1920 watching what the storm-cut inlet did to Sinepuxent Bay. Within eight weeks of the February storm they were reporting "a new seafish industry" — deep-sea species never before caught in the bay taken in quantity, fishermen throwing seines across the channel instead of running three or four miles offshore, "the fisheries industry … completely revolutionized." One commissioner, J. Edward White of Worcester County, valued a permanent inlet at millions to the county and expected oyster planting to spread north of Box Iron for the first time.
In the record (7)
1923 · 1923-06-16
The 1920 inlet has moved Maryland's clam line north — and Virginia watermen are raiding the beds because no county law covers them.
The Worcester Democrat of 16 June 1923 carried a discussion of the county's shellfish: "Back in those days oysters were plentiful in Worcester county. However, in recent years they have become scarce, and clams have been increasing. The increase of clams came with the cut of an inlet through Ocean City which let brackish ocean water into Synepuxent Bay. The clams began leaving the Virginia waters for the Maryland waters. They are as far as Ocean City now." It adds that the State Conservation Commission "has frequently studied the Worcester county problem, but always has it been found that there was no law which authorized any conservation measures or any police supervision," and that Virginia watermen, knowing they have only county officers to contend with, "have raided the Maryland clam beds."
The 1922 joint resolution justified the dynamite by seventy-five thousand acres of oyster bottom. A year later the salt had changed the bay's animal, not just its chemistry — and the state had no law to police what it had made.
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1924
For the first time since the crabbing licence law of 1916, thirty-three crabbers are licensed in Sinepuxent Bay — because the storm made an inlet the governments could not.
Evening Star, 31 July 1924, special dispatch from Baltimore, under the headline 'CRABBERS FIND HAVEN — Storm Converts Sinepuxent Bay Into Rich Fields': 'What both the Federal and State governments tried in vain to do was accomplished by nature and now Sinepuxent Bay, the narrow body of water between Ocean City, Md., and the mainland, is becoming the seat of a crabbing industry, according to Swepson Earle, State conservation commission. For the first time since the crabbing license law was passed in 1916, licenses were issued to 33 crabbers to ply their trade in the Sinepuxent. Earle explained that the growth of crabbing in the Sinepuxent was due to the inlet made by the heavy storm of a few years ago. For years the State and Federal governments tried to open a waterway between the Sinepuxent and the ocean, but each time the inlet closed. Then nature provided the opening.' The Worcester Democrat of 26 July had trailed the same official's tour: Earle would 'survey the crab situation in Honga river, Fishing Bay, Great Choptank river, Eastern Bay and the sound at Ocean City, where crabs are thriving since the opening of the inlet has salted the water.'
1923 said the salt had brought the clams north. 1924 says it brought the crabs, and puts a number on it: thirty-three licensed watermen in a bay that had never licensed one.
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1925 · 1925-07-20
Ocean City crabbers called the Virginia dredgers "crableggers," and a $10 fine at Snow Hill emptied the bay of the whole crab fleet for a day.
Worcester Democrat, 25 July 1925, "Fined In Worcester Court For Crab Dredging": "William Windsor, of Deals Island, was fined $10 in the July term of the Worcester County Circuit Court Monday for failure to establish residence in this county while dredging for crabs in the Sinepuxent Bay. Judges Robert F. Duer and John R. Pattison were on the bench. The 75,000 acre expanse of the Sinepuxent Bay was almost evacuated Monday of the usual fleet of crab dredgers while more than a score of watermen journeyed to Snow Hill to witness the trial. Ocean City crabbers are also up in arms over the allegations that Virginia dredgers, forced by the dearth of crabs around the east coast of Virginia to seek other territory, are now exploiting the Sinepuxent Bay. These alleged poachers are termed 'crableggers' by the native watermen, who say that the Virginians often dredge the spawn crabs and fail to return them to the water."
Two years after the salted-up bay brought the clams north from Virginia, the Virginians came after them — and Prohibition gave the watermen the word for it.
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1933 · 1933-04-21
Four months before the storm, Maryland wrote a law that begins 'whenever the Ocean City Inlet is sufficiently advanced'
'Whenever the Conservation Commissioner shall consider that the Ocean City Inlet is sufficiently advanced to warrant the leasing of oyster bottoms in Sinepuxent Bay, he shall give notice, by publication in a newspaper of general circulation in Worcester County, that on a day to be named in said notice, he will receive applications for leases.' Priority for the first thirty days went to bona fide owners or occupants of planted areas; for the thirty days after that, to any resident of Worcester County. The act was approved on 21 April 1933 and took effect 1 June — four months before the ocean made the inlet the law was waiting for. Maryland had already made two 1931 oyster and clam acts for Worcester County contingent on the inlet's construction. The state had legislated for a harbour it did not have. — 1934 FULL PASS, 2026-08-11 [confirmed]: The conditional survived the storm and was re-enacted after it. Chapter 77 of the Acts of 1933 (Special Session) keeps the same contingent form — 'Whenever the Conservation Commissioner shall consider that the Ocean City Inlet is sufficiently advanced to warrant the leasing of oyster bottoms, he shall give notice, by publication in a newspaper of general circulation in Worcester County' — and redraws the clamming grounds off the new works, running a boundary 'to the southernmost point of the newly constructed channel from the Ocean City Inlet, which point is located about one mile northeasterly of Robins Marsh'. So into 1934 the oyster and clam law still turned on an official judgement that the inlet was far enough along, and the geography of the fishery had been rewritten around a channel that had not existed eighteen months earlier.
Source · checked 2026-08-10
1933 · 1933-12-11
The special session claimed for the state every island the dredging would create — and gave their dimensions
Chapter 69 of the special session of November–December 1933 adds a new section to the Conservation article 'providing for the retention by the State of title to all lands hereafter formed in Sinepuxent, Isle of Wight and Chincoteague Bays by reason of the excavation of the Ocean City Inlet and Channel or by natural causes since August, 1933.' Its preamble is the best engineering description of the project anywhere in the 1933 record: 'it appears from the dredging specifications issued by the War Department of the United States, that during the process of construction of said inlet a channel will be made for a distance of approximately 11½ miles from the inlet through the Sinepuxent and Chincoteague Bays, and that in disposing of the excavated material, there will be deposits made, adjacent to the channel, which will cause areas of land or islands to be formed or made, extending the length of said channel, each of which will be of dimensions approximately 1,000 feet in length, 20 feet in width, and 5 feet in height above mean low water mark.' The idea had been put up by Swepson Earle, the state conservation commissioner, and the Washington Times reported it from Annapolis on 5 December as 'Maryland To Claim Islands, When and If.' — 1934 FULL PASS, 2026-08-11 [confirmed]: Re-read at the source and confirmed verbatim. Chapter 69 of the Acts of 1933 (Special Session), approved 15 December 1933 by Governor Albert C. Ritchie as an emergency law, adds Section 27 to Article 19A: 'All lands made or formed by the dumping or depositing of excavated material in the Sinepuxent, Isle of Wight and Chincoteague Bays during the construction or maintenance of the Ocean City Inlet and Channel in said Bays, as well as all land now made or which may hereafter be made or formed by natural causes since the opening of the inlet in August, 1933, between the ocean and the bays, are hereby declared to be natural resources of the State of Maryland'. The preamble gives the island dimensions as 'approximately 1,000 feet in length, 20 feet in width, and 5 feet in height above mean low water mark' along an 11 1/2-mile channel. This is the law in force through the whole of 1934: Maryland held no legislative session in 1934, so the 1933 special session's inlet acts are the operative regime for the year.
Source · checked 2026-08-10
1935 · 1935-05-17
Maryland made the leasing of its coastal oyster bottoms wait on one man's opinion of whether the Ocean City inlet was far enough along
Chapter 221 of the Acts of 1935, approved 17 May, amended Section 154B of Article 72 and hinges the whole coastal oyster industry on the state of the works at Ocean City: “Whenever the Conservation Commissioner shall consider that the Ocean City Inlet is sufficiently advanced to warrant the leasing of oyster bottoms, he shall give notice...” Leases were capped at fifty acres and confined to Maryland residents, with thirty days' priority to existing planters and then thirty days to Worcester County residents. Chincoteague Bay south of a line running due east from the mouth of Tanhouse Creek above Sugar Point stayed closed until the salinity warranted it, “but in no event ... beyond June 1, 1937.” The same session's Chapter 223 cut the clam licence to five dollars plus a quarter for the clerk, abolished the separate non-resident fee, and provided that “Boys of twelve years of age and under shall not be required to secure a license.” The legislature is drafting on the assumption that the inlet is unfinished — and it was right: the Corps put the project at 89 per cent complete with a controlling depth of 5.6 feet at the end of that June. — 1936 FULL PASS, 2026-08-11 [confirmed]: The wait ended. By February 1936 dredgers were working charted oyster bottoms in Sinepuxent Bay and seed planted two years earlier on charted areas in Isle of Wight Bay was coming to market at $1.25 a bushel.
Source · checked 2026-08-11
1936 · 1936-04-09
The winter of 1935-36 was cold enough to kill the crabs in the Worcester County bays
'Large numbers of crabs had frozen to death in the bays during the long, severe winter,' the Messenger reported on 9 April 1936, from watermen at Ocean City, Stockton and Girdletree; dead crabs were being dredged up and found lying inert along the shoreline, and the county's watermen feared the 1936 crabbing season in the Chincoteague, Sinepuxent, Isle of Wight and Assawoman bays 'might be both late and lean'. The same winter is on the town's own record: the PWA resolution of 9 June describes 'the unusally arduous winter and inclement weather prevailing during the past months of January and February' as having stopped the sewer contractor from starting before 1 March. In February the State Conservation Department and Ocean City sportsmen had been feeding grain and wheat screenings to wildfowl found in a starved condition along the beach.
Source · checked 2026-08-11