Sinepuxent Salt Water Inlet Company
company · active 1908–
Also known as Synepuxent Salt Water Inlet Co.; the Inlet Company
Worcester County stock company formed to cut and maintain an inlet from the Atlantic Ocean into Sinepuxent Bay at Ocean City — not for navigation but to restore the salinity that the bay's oysters needed, after the only natural inlet was blocked by a wreck more than thirty years earlier. Orlando Harrison of Berlin was president; Dodge & Day of Philadelphia were the civil engineers; John T. Keas was superintendent and Capt. W. B. S. Powell ran the beach work. In 1908 the company drove piling the width of Sinepuxent Bay, laid a brush dyke on it from the bayside to within a few feet of the beach so that the banked-up water would scour a channel, contracted for a twelve-inch sand blower at $1,200, built its own steam dredge, and by December was cutting through the beach from bay to ocean. About $10,000 of stock had been subscribed by April and more was being solicited in December; F. C. Warrener, assistant engineer of the War Department, came down on a special train to view the work and pronounced it feasible. The stockholders offered publicly to surrender their holdings to the State of Maryland if the State would cut and maintain the inlet instead.
In the record (5)
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.
The whole of 1908 in the Democratic Messenger is the story of this company. February: "A meeting of the stockholders of the Sinepuxent Salt Water Inlet Co. will be held at Dirickson's Hall in Berlin, Md., on February 12th, 1908 … The plans are prepared for your inspection. ORLANDO HARRISON, President." April: "WORK ON INLET COMMENCED — Under Guidance Of Competent Civil Engineers Who Are Sure of Success … At a meeting of the stockholders in Berlin last Monday the old directors were re-elected. Mr. O. D. Collins was elected in place of Lambert Ayres, deceased. Dodge & Day, civil engineers of Philadelphia, have been employed to plan the work and Mr. John T. Keas has been appointed superintendent. Work of constructing bulkheads from the bayside to the beach will start at once. $10,000.00 worth of stock has been subscribed for, about one-fourth of which has been paid in." June: "THE SALT WATER WILL SOON FLOW — Workmen Pushing Ahead On The Inlet — Piling All Driven … All of the piling has been driven across the Sinepuxent Bay for the dyke, and a large number of men are at work under the supervision of Capt. W. B. S. Powell, putting down the brush" — brush cut from the beach lands near Green Run Life-Saving Station and delivered by a fleet of monitors, with "hundreds of people … visiting the grounds where the work is being done." August: the piling all down, the cutting through the beach under way, a 12-inch sand blower contracted for at $1,200, and boat-loads of Snow Hill people taken down to see it on the day of the Democratic congressional convention. December: "CUTTING THE INLET NEAR OCEAN CITY, MD. The steam dredge which has been recently built by the Sinepuxent Salt Water Inlet Company is cutting its way through the beach from bay to ocean with great rapidity," illustrated with a cut showing the dredge and "a portion of the dyke which has been constructed from the bayside to within a few feet of the beach, with the purpose of concentrating at the beach side all the force of the water banked up against this dyke." On 26 December the paper printed a letter from F. C. Warrener, assistant engineer of the War Department, who had "came to Ocean City on a special train to view the inlet," saying he was glad of the progress and had already given his opinion that it would succeed. The object was never navigation: "its first object was to promote the welfare of the oystermen and increase the oyster industry of Worcester County."
Orlando HarrisonJohn T. KeasWilliam B. S. Powell
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1909 · 1909-07-24
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.
"INLET CUT FROM BAY TO OCEAN. Water of the Atlantic Now Flowing in Sinepuxent Bay. Will be Success." The Sinepuxent Salt Water Inlet Company finished the work it began in April 1908. "At the opening where the dam was cut, the water is at least four feet deep with a width of over sixty feet, and as it is gradually deepening and widening, there is every encouragement to believe that the enterprise will be a success. Hundreds of people were present at the opening, among the number being Mr. Orlando Harrison, president of the Salt Water Inlet Company; Oliver D. Collins, John T. Keys, Capt. W. B. S. Powell, Capt. George S. Scarborough, Robert J. Showell, William Whaley, C. L. Vincent, editor of the Messenger, and hundreds of others. Mr. Orlando Harrison cut the last strip of land with his shovel and let the water from the bay to the ocean amid the cheers of the people witnessing the event." At 11 o'clock Sunday morning Capt. W. B. S. Powell sailed a government boat out of the inlet to the ocean and back through it to Ocean City. The paper reported that the State of Maryland would likely be asked to help maintain it, and that Senator John Walter Smith and Congressman J. Harry Covington would be asked to seek a federal appropriation, "because it is conceived by everyone who visits it that if this inlet can be made permanent it will be the means of making Ocean City one of the greatest health resorts along the Atlantic coast." Two weeks earlier the Messenger's Berlin column had reported the government engineer's "official permission to dike the inlet, without which it could not be permanent," and by mid-August "the crabs in Sinepuxent Bay, since the opening of the Inlet, are the finest ever seen there, and the most abundant."
Twenty-four years before the 1933 storm did it for nothing, a stock company of Berlin businessmen cut an inlet through this beach by hand and by dredge — and for one month it worked.
Orlando HarrisonJohn T. KeasWilliam B. S. Powell
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1909 · 1909-09-06
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."
"SINEPUXENT INLET IS CLOSED AGAIN. SALISBURY, Md., Sept. 6 — Sinepuxent Inlet, which was constructed some time ago to connect the ocean near Ocean City with the Sinepuxent Bay, is a failure, according to reports received from Ocean City. When the inlet was dug the promoters of the project figured out that the rise and fall of the tide would keep the channel open at all times and that the water flowing through would keep the inlet navigable. Instead of keeping the channel open the tide has persistently washed sand into it until the inlet has been completely closed up on the bay side of the channel. A proposition is now on foot to build a bulkhead out into the Sinepuxent Bay on both sides of the channel and by this means it is hoped to keep the sand from blocking up the waterway to the ocean." The *Democratic Messenger*, which had covered the cutting for eighteen months and put the dredge on its front page, printed nothing about the closing on any 1909 page that mentions Ocean City. The obituary of the scheme came from a Wilmington daily.
The lesson the 1933 inlet had to be taught by a hurricane and then by the Army Corps: on this coast a cut stays open only if something holds it open.
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1912 · 1912-04-08
The sand won: the Sinepuxent inlet has closed itself in, and the legislature gives the company until 1918 to try again.
The question left open by 1908 — whether the Sinepuxent Salt Water Inlet Company's steam dredge ever opened a lasting cut — is answered in the Democratic Messenger of 30 March 1912, under the head "Sinepuxent Inlet": "Mr. Taylor of this county introduced a bill in the House to extend until 1918 the life of the act incorporating the Sinepuxent Saltwater Inlet Company. This company was chartered about eight years ago to dig an inlet across Sinepuxent Beach, about a mile below Ocean City, to admit the salt water of the Atlantic Ocean into the Sinepuxent Bay, the purpose being to make the upper waters of the bay available for oyster planting. The State spent $2,500 to aid the project, which has thus far failed because of the closing in of the sand, thus wiping out the canal. It is proposed to renew the project." The bill became Chapter 518 of the Acts of 1912, approved 8 April, which repealed and re-enacted sections 7, 8 and 14 of Chapter 338 of 1906 — the company's charter, previously untraced. It re-authorised the company "to cut, dig and make canals or inlets of any width or depth it may deem necessary or proper, at such places on the eastern border of Worcester county, located north or south of Ocean City," recited that the bays "have been unhealthy fresh waters for many years past and unfit for the natural growth and cultivation of oysters... by reason of the closing of inlets formerly existing," granted the company exclusive shellfish rights over a described block of bay bottom, and set a new deadline: "the above mentioned canal shall be completed on or before the first day of May, 1918."
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1928 · 1928-03-27
Orlando Harrison of Berlin dies in March 1928 — the nurseryman who cut an inlet at Ocean City in 1908 and got the bay bridge built in 1916.
Milford Chronicle, 30 March 1928, and Smyrna Times, 28 March: "Besides his widow he leaves four sons: G. Hale Harrison, Orlando Harrison, Jr., Henry L. Harrison, and John L. Harrison. He is also survived by two sisters, Mrs. Geo. W. Purnell of Berlin, and Mrs. William B. S. Powell of Ocean City, Md. Funeral services [were held] Tuesday afternoon at Stevenson M. E. Church at Berlin. Former Governor John G. Townsend of Delaware, a life-long friend, was one of the pallbearers." Harrison was born at Roxana, Delaware in 1867; he sat in the Maryland House of Delegates, served several terms as mayor of Berlin, and was elected to the Maryland Senate in 1913, holding the seat until his death. His Harrison Brothers Nurseries at Berlin was the largest grower of fruit trees in the world.
This registry already holds him twice over: as president of the Sinepuxent Salt Water Inlet Company, whose steam dredge cut from bay to ocean in 1908, and as the senator who wrote to the State Roads Commission about the Ocean City bay bridge in 1916 and asked for the soundings that fixed its price. He is a Berlin man, not an Ocean City one — and one of his sisters had married into Ocean City, to the Powells who owned the Atlantic Hotel before Dr. Purnell bought it in 1922. Twenty-five years after Harrison tried to cut an inlet, the sea cut one two miles from where he put his dyke.
Source · checked 2026-08-06