Harry W. Nice

In the record (3)

1. 1919

   The Red Summer reaches Ocean City as an editorial demand that a candidate coming to town declare himself on "the social barriers between the two races."

   The Democratic Messenger of 2 August 1919, under the heading "PLEASE EXPLAIN": "Mr. Harry Nice, Republican candidate for Governor will visit the Eastern Shore early in August and we understand he will be at Ocean City about August 20th. The recent race riots in this country makes it necessary for the people of the Eastern Shore to ascertain the attitude of Mr Nice and every man who runs on a ticket with him this Fall, toward breaking down the social barriers between the two races." The riots referred to are the Red Summer of 1919 — Chicago's had begun a week earlier, Washington's a fortnight before that. The county paper's response was not to report them but to use them as a loyalty test, aimed at a candidate who was on his way to Ocean City. It is the only place in 1919's corpus where Ocean City and the year's national racial violence appear in the same paragraph.

   The town's segregation thread runs 1906 (a move to ban Black excursions), 1906 and 1911 (Jim Crow suits over the Ocean City Flyer) — and then 1919, when the demand is no longer about a railroad car but about a governor.

   Source · checked 2026-08-06

2. 1919 · 1919-08-24

   Harry W. Nice, Republican candidate for governor, addresses 5,000 people at Ocean City.

   The Annapolis Evening Capital of 25 August 1919, reporting Nice's approach to Annapolis: "Mr. Nice has been spending the past two days addressing meetings and shaking hands with party men in sections of the Eastern Shore. Yesterday he addressed an audience of 5,000 persons at Ocean City. Leaving there tomorrow morning, he will motor to Claiborne and from there come to Annapolis via the ferry." Five thousand is a crowd on the order of the whole 4 July bridge celebration; it is the largest political audience recorded at Ocean City in the campaign's registry. Nice lost the 1919 election to Albert C. Ritchie by 165 votes and became governor sixteen years later.

   Source · checked 2026-08-06

3. 1936 · 1936-09-18

   On 18 September 1936 a hurricane took most of Ocean City's boardwalk, fifteen harbour-front homes and, for four hours, the town itself

   A tropical hurricane moving up the coast reached Ocean City at noon on Friday 18 September 1936 and battered the town for fourteen hours with a north-east gale the Democratic Messenger put at seventy miles an hour. The Salisbury Times of that afternoon led 'Ocean City Is Isolated; Water Knee-Deep Over Bridge; Sea, Six Feet Above Normal High Tide Pounds Resort', and reported Governor Harry W. Nice ordering the National Guard to stand ready. Three to six feet of water covered the mainland approach to the State Highway bridge and ran a mile inland; the resort was cut off from noon until four o'clock. Five blocks of boardwalk between the Washington Pharmacy and the Colonial Hotel were swept away or badly damaged, and from the Shoreham Hotel north to the walk's end the whole structure was washed out - the storm sparing only the Majestic Hotel and its cottage, where not a shingle was lost. North of the Catholic Home a hundred-foot section of boardwalk was carried a block inland. Fifteen harbour-front dwellings and houseboat homes were demolished, and the office of Inlet Engineer E. J. Monahan, standing near the inlet, was swept away. Mayor W. Thomas Elliott first put the damage at $100,000 and within a week at more than $150,000, of which $50,000 was boardwalk and other municipal property. By 21 September, with boys from the nearby CCC camp helping to clear the debris, the estimate had risen to nearly a quarter of a million dollars. The town's immediate problem, the Times wrote, was 'digging itself out from under tons of sand carried inward from the beach.'

   Ocean City's boardwalk has no founding date, but it has destruction dates, and 18 September 1936 is one of the biggest. The freak detail the town told and retold was the Majestic: everything on either side of it wrecked, and not a shingle off the hotel.

   Ocean City BoardwalkThe BeachThe Shoreham Hotel / Shenanigan's Irish PubW. Thomas Elliott

   Source · checked 2026-08-11