John N. Mackall
Chief Engineer, then Chairman, Maryland State Roads Commission · active 1919–1927
Chief engineer of the Maryland State Roads Commission and, in his own description, the man responsible for building Ocean City's first automobile bridge. He spoke at the dedication on 4 July 1919, saying the bridge "was a big undertaking for which credit was due primarily to the people of Maryland and Worcester County" and that "it was the last link in the chain of good roads from Ocean City to Western Maryland." He later chaired the Commission; the Mackall name attaches to Maryland road-building through the 1920s. By December 1927 he is CHAIRMAN of the Commission, not its chief engineer, and is named with Senator Orlando Harrison as personally responsible for the $100,000 Sinepuxent Bay dredging contract and the $40,000 Ocean City bridge improvement.
In the record (1)
1927
Maryland commits $140,000 to dredge and scour the storm inlet south of Ocean City — five years before the storm that made the real one.
In December 1927 the Maryland State Roads Commission awarded a $100,000 contract to a Baltimore company for dredging in Sinepuxent Bay, and held a hearing on a $40,000 improvement to the Ocean City highway bridge over the bay: "the State Roads Commission of Maryland is at present involved in an expenditure of $140,000 toward the protection and improvement of the natural inlet and the Ocean City resort." The dredging was "a channel 150 feet wide and 4,000 feet long in the Sinepuxent Bay, extending northward from the natural inlet, three miles south of Ocean City." Its purpose was hydraulic: "to direct water on the ebbing tide through the channel of the natural inlet, in an effort to cleanse the inlet of sand deposits which are slowly filling up the inlet channel. At present, without a channel down the bay, the force of the falling tide is not sufficient to cleanse the inlet of deposits. The water passes on down the bay 45 miles where it connects with the sea at Chincoteague Island, Va." The bridge work was the same idea from the other end: Chairman Mackall planned to remove 152 feet of solid fill at each end of the approaches to the existing concrete open bridge and refill under the bridge with dredged material, "not only to safeguard the bridge from severe currents which flow under it, but to allow a greater flow of water to enter Upper Sinepuxent Bay and the Isle of Wight Bay so that this water may be available on ebb tide to scour the natural inlet three miles south of Ocean City of sediment brought in by the flood tide." The money was to come "out of the state appropriation of $150,000, given by the Legislature in 1926 for the protection of the inlet and Ocean City, Md." State Senator Orlando Harrison of Worcester County and Chairman John N. Mackall of the State Roads Commission are named as responsible.
Three years after Governor Ritchie vetoed $50,000 for jetties to keep the inlet open, the state was spending $140,000 to do exactly that — and the engineering logic is the same one that would be applied to the 1933 inlet: build a channel so the ebb tide scours what the flood tide silts up. Ocean City did not learn to keep an inlet open in 1934. It had been paying for the lesson since 1920.
Ocean City Inlet & JettyMaryland State Roads CommissionOrlando Harrison
Source · checked 2026-08-06