History

J. Edward White

member, Maryland State Conservation Commission · active 1920

A member of the Maryland State Conservation Commission and a resident of Worcester County, and the man who put a value on the inlet the February 1920 storm cut through the beach below Ocean City. "If the inlet remains," he told the papers in April, "it will be worth millions of dollars to Worcester county. It was an act of nature but it was the biggest job ever put across in one night. It did exactly what it required months for us to do 10 years ago at an enormous [cost] and then it closed up overnight." He expected residents to take up oyster planting north of Box Iron for the first time, and believed a long offshore bar would keep the new channel open. It did not stay open; the inlet Ocean City has today was cut in 1933. — 1940 FULL PASS, 2026-08-11: activeYears / bio - POSSIBLE SECOND APPEARANCE, IDENTITY NOT ESTABLISHED: member, Maryland State Conservation Commission; activeYears '1920' → NO CHANGE MADE. Flagged only: a J. Edward White, Justice of the Peace and later styled Magistrate, administered the oath of office to the Mayor of Ocean City on 2 January 1940 and to the mayor and three councilmen on 10 September 1940. — The name, the county and a twenty-year gap are all consistent with the Conservation Commission member of 1920, who was a Worcester County resident and who is on this campaign's record for his judgement of the 1920 inlet. But a name and a county are not an identification, and this campaign has been wrong before about assuming two records with one surname are one man. The 1940 magistrate has therefore been entered as a SEPARATE record, person:j-edward-white-magistrate, and the two should NOT be merged until somebody establishes it. Ocean City was given its own central magistrate in 1939 at $500 a year; whether this is the holder of that office is also not established.