History

C. W. Spofford

hotelier · active 1889–1889 at Ocean City

Proprietor of the Riggs House in Washington, D.C., who in February 1889 took a five-year lease on the Atlantic Hotel at Ocean City and ran it through the 1889 season, advertising terms of $2.50 and $3 a day and $17.50 and $20 a week against a stated capacity of 600. His name carried Washington's hotel trade to the Maryland beach: the Evening Star told its readers that Ocean City was "peculiarly interesting to Washingtonians this season from the fact that the principal hotel is kept by Mr. C. W. Spofford of the Riggs house." By September 1889 a Delaware correspondent already referred to him as "the recent proprietor of the Atlantic House, Ocean City," so the five-year lease appears not to have run its term.

Ocean City's first celebrity-manager import, hired to make a sandbar hotel feel like the capital's best address.