History

E. W. McMaster

Superintendent of Schools, Worcester County · active 1914

County Superintendent of Schools for Worcester County, credited from the platform at Ocean City in June 1914 with carrying the "Ocean City Educational Building" Act — Chapter 227 of 1914 — through the General Assembly. E. Clarke Fontaine's printed address of welcome to the Maryland State Teachers' Association said McMaster, "by his tactful, persuasive, persevering, untiring, never-say-die efforts in its behalf, as it pursued its dubious way through devious and dark byways of legislative [procedure], is largely responsible to-night for its triumphant and final passage." Under the act's terms the county superintendent sat ex officio on the Ocean City School Building Commission.

In the record (2)

  1. 1914 · 1914-04-01

    Chapter 227 of 1914 puts $25,000 of state money and $2,000 of county money into a public school building at Ocean City — and makes the town condemn the ground for it.

    The Maryland General Assembly sat in 1914 and passed exactly two acts touching Ocean City. The larger is Chapter 227, approved 1 April 1914, which recites that "the State of Maryland has not any available building on the Eastern Shore suitable for the accommodation of such assemblages" of public school teachers and that "Ocean City, Maryland's only seaside town, is an ideal place for such meetings." It creates an **Ocean City School Building Commission** — the President of the State Board of Education, the State Superintendent of Public Education, the president and county superintendent of the Worcester County school commissioners, and a fifth man of their choosing — appropriates $25,000 from the State Treasury and directs the Worcester County Commissioners to levy $2,000, and requires the **Mayor and City Council of Ocean City** to furnish and donate the site, arming them with the power to condemn it if they cannot agree a price. The finished building becomes the property of the State of Maryland, and from 1 September to 1 June each year is the Worcester County public school at Ocean City, rent-free. This is the first state money the campaign has found being spent on a building inside Ocean City. No charter legislation passed for the town in 1914, as none had in 1910 or 1912.

    Ocean City School Building CommissionState Teachers' Association of MarylandPhillips Lee Goldsborough

    Source · checked 2026-08-06

  2. 1914 · 1914-06-29

    The Maryland State Teachers' Association holds its forty-seventh annual meeting at Ocean City, and is welcomed with a speech crediting one man with the school-building act.

    The Association convened at Ocean City on Monday 29 June 1914 for four days — its first return "after a lapse of four years." E. Clarke Fontaine's printed address of welcome, on behalf of the Worcester County superintendent, school officials and teachers, makes the political point plainly: "I beg leave to recall to your minds in this connection the passage of a certain act by our recent legislature, known as the 'Ocean City Educational Building' Act. To the school superintendent of Worcester County was delegated the sponsorship of this bill, and I know whereof I speak when I assert the claim, that **E. W. McMaster**, by his tactful, persuasive, persevering, never-say-die efforts in its behalf, as it pursued its dubious way through devious and dark byways of legislative [procedure], is largely responsible to-night for its triumphant and final passage. 'Welcome?' Well, I should say so. Through the efforts of our County Superintendent, it has been brought to pass that henceforth this Association has no earthly excuse for holding its annual convention anywhere" else. The Messenger's own headline of 27 June called it the forty-sixth meeting; its text, the Evening Star of 14 May and Fontaine's address all say forty-seventh.

    State Teachers' Association of Maryland

    Source · checked 2026-08-06