History

Chas. Henry

hotel keeper, Ocean City · active 1937-1939

The proprietor of the Henry Hotel, the only hotel in Ocean City the campaign can show was kept for Black guests. He appears three times, all of them in the white town's own records: a building permit in 1937 for an addition at Baltimore Avenue and South Division Street; Mayor Elliott's published 1937 building list, which gives 'Chas. Henry Hotel for Negroes, $1,500'; and the Ocean City new-assessment list of 21 June 1939, which reads 'Chas Henry add Hotel 600'. Nothing he said or wrote survives in any source this campaign has reached.

In the record (1)

  1. 1939 · 1939-06-21

    The Henry Hotel added six hundred dollars' worth of building in 1939, and the town's new-assessment list is the only place it is written down

    The Mayor and City Council assessed the year's new building at the meeting of 21 June 1939 and sent notice to every owner. In the middle of the list, between 'Harrison, Public Lots' and 'Joe & Edith Hickmott', the clerk wrote: 'Chas Henry add Hotel 600'. Four lines above it stands 'Clarence Carey garage 200'. The list runs to about seventy entries and is the town's whole year of construction in one page and a half: Calvin Pruitt's Admiral at $25,000 is the largest single item, John and Minnie Lynch's new cottage at $9,000 the next, Ulmer S. Evans's log cabin $4,500, the Yacht Club $12,000, Alton Purnell's Brighton Hotel, T. J. Cropper's shanties $500 and Emma Farrell's beer joint $500.

    This is the third document in the whole campaign that names the Henry Hotel, and all three are the white town's own paperwork - a permit in 1937, the mayor's building list in 1937, and now a line in an assessment book. The hotel that existed to serve Black visitors is legible to us only through the ledger of the people who would not house them.

    The Henry HotelClarence CareyCalvin P. PruittJ. M. Mumford

    Source · checked 2026-08-11