Tidewater Construction Company
company · active 1936
The Norfolk, Virginia contractor awarded, on or about 2 July 1936, the contract for building 580 feet of steel bulkhead in Ocean City harbour to permit the location of a new Coast Guard boathouse. The cost of the project was estimated at $15,000; by mid-September a government dredge was rapidly driving the bulkhead for the new Coast Guard basin.
In the record (1)
1941 · 1941-12-08
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.
The Salisbury Times of 9 December 1941 reported that 'the Ocean City bridge was completed yesterday and will be officially accepted by the State Roads Commission this week — tentatively by Friday at the latest'. It gives the structure in detail: a 2,295-foot span of concrete and reinforced steel built by the Tidewater Construction Company of Norfolk, Virginia; a causeway 48 feet wide carrying four lanes with a five-foot walk on each side; and a double-leaf bascule span over the artificial channel on the east side of Sinepuxent Bay harbour, giving a 20-foot vertical and a 70-foot horizontal opening. 'Ocean City's new highway bridge today enters this Maryland resort at North Division Street, six city blocks north of the present highway bridge at Worcester Street.' And then the sting: 'traffic will not be permitted to cross the span until the summer of 1942, following completion of the $406,829 Herring Creek highway approach and the $178,000 dual Herring Creek bridge project' — a declaration made the previous night by P. A. Morison, district engineer of the State Roads Commission on the Eastern Shore. It slipped further than that. The county's own paper closed the year with it, on 23 December: 'NEW OCEAN CITY BRIDGE IS CLOSED UNTIL SUMMER. The Ocean City new State Highway bridge across the Sinepuxent bay has been completed but will not be opened to traffic until next summer, according to announcement made by P. A. Morrison, State Roads Commission district engineer. The span has been under construction since May of this year.' Seven months, May to December. And the Commission's own operating report for the fiscal years 1941-1942 says at printed page 78: 'In Worcester County the new Sinepuxent Bay Bridge, which was completed in the fall of 1941, was not opened to traffic until November 16, 1942, because of the uncompleted approaches to the bridge.' The road that would carry the entire post-war boom was finished on the day the United States entered the war and could not be driven across for another eleven months.
Route 50 Drawbridge (Harry W. Kelley Memorial Bridge)
Source · checked 2026-08-11