Capt. C. E. Babbitt
steamboat captain and owner · active 1899
Owner and master of the steamer Ocean City, built for him in 1899 by E. James Tull at the Pocomoke City shipyards to run daily between Chincoteague and Ocean City. He opened the service at the start of the 1899 season, with a wharf built for him near the railroad bridge by Hobbs of the Eastern Shore House, and withdrew the weekday trips as unprofitable by the end of July, keeping a Sunday excursion schedule from Chincoteague via Franklin City and Public Landing and offering the boat for charter to parties of 25 to 100. The county paper judged it "a worthy enterprise" that "deserved encouragement and patronage."
In the record (1)
1906
Three vessels come ashore on the Worcester beach in 1906 — and every crew gets off alive.
The three-masted schooner Ida M. Gibson of Bethel, Del., Captain F. A. Bradley, ran on the beach at about 5 a.m. on Thursday 22 February between the North Beach and Green Run life-saving stations. Bound up the coast from City Point, Va. with a cargo of lumber, she met a heavy blow, shifted her cargo and sprang a leak; Bradley tried for the Delaware Breakwater, turned for Chincoteague Inlet, then beached her rather than founder. Captain and crew took to the small boats and landed without mishap. She was a total wreck, valued at $10,000 and uninsured. In March the three-masted Pendleton Sisters was wrecked on the same coast with about 800,000 feet of Texas heart pine aboard; Captain Charles Babbitt, Eugene Rowley and N. H. Gordy of Chincoteague bought the cargo where it lay for $5,000 and by late August had recovered perhaps 400,000 feet. And in the small hours of Tuesday 25 September the two-masted fishing smack Marion Grimes of New York went ashore hard and fast about four miles below Pope's Island Life-Saving Station with a crew of fifteen, all safely landed — reported to the Messenger by special wire from Ocean City.
A working coast: three hulls lost, no lives lost, and a salvage crew doing arithmetic on 800,000 feet of pine.
United States Life-Saving Service
Source · checked 2026-08-06