History

B. Frank Wagamon

Ocean City businessman and railway promoter · active 1917

Ocean City businessman, partner with C. Edward Shute in the office where subscription books for the Ocean City and Fenwick Island Railway Company were opened in March 1917, and one of its five incorporators alongside Mayor William B. S. Powell, Henry T. Moore and Sherman E. Ayars. With Shute he found the bottled "German gunboat" message on the beach north of Ocean City in May 1917. The surname is printed variously as Wagamon, Wugamon and Wagaman.

In the record (2)

  1. 1917 · 1917-03-26

    The Ocean City and Fenwick Island Railway Company opens subscription books — the mayor among its five incorporators.

    A legal notice in the Democratic Messenger of 17 and 24 March 1917: "The Ocean City and Fenwick Island Railway Company, Inc. Notice is hereby given that the undersigned incorporators of the above mentioned Railway Company will open books of subscription to the capital stock of said Company at the office of Edward Shute and B. Frank Wagamon in Ocean City, Worcester County, Maryland, Monday, March 26th, 1917. C. EDWARD SHUTE. B. FRANK WAGAMON. WILLIAM B. S. POWELL. HENRY T. MOORE. SHERMAN E. AYARS." The proposal is a beach railway running north from Ocean City to Fenwick Island — the line Rev. W. C. Poole would still be arguing for in December, and the same corridor the county had been talking about since the 1890s. Two of the five incorporators, Shute and Wagamon, are the men who found the German bottle on the beach seven weeks later; the third is the sitting mayor and proprietor of the Atlantic Hotel. No evidence has been found that the line was ever built.

    The Ocean City and Fenwick Island Railway Company, Inc.William B. S. PowellC. Edward Shute

    Source · checked 2026-08-06

  2. 1917 · 1917-05-09

    "GERMANS NEAR HERE!" — two Ocean City men find a bottled message on the beach claiming a prisoner on a German gunboat and fifteen submarines.

    The Democratic Messenger of 12 May 1917 ran the headline "GERMANS NEAR HERE! A Startling Message Found On Beach At Ocean City." Edward Shute and B. Frank Wagamon, of Ocean City, found on the beach on Wednesday about two miles north of the town "a glass bottle inclosing a piece of greasy card-board bearing the following words written in lead pencil: 'I am a prisoner on a German gunboat. I think we are near New York. Ten to fifteen submarines. Overthrow of German Government plans. I think I will be drowned tonight.' There is a signature but it is not legible." The bottle came ashore "with several other bottles and a few large onions and oranges and small wreckage, apparently just washed up." The Washington Times carried it as a Snow Hill dispatch on 10 May. Five weeks after the declaration of war, this is the earliest documented U-boat scare on the Ocean City beach — twenty-five years before the real one.

    C. Edward Shute

    Source · checked 2026-08-06