Lizzie R. Hearne
hotelier · active 1902–1930s
Bought the Belmont Hotel on Dorchester Street in 1902, five years after Lambert Ayres built it a few steps off the Boardwalk, and is recorded in the 1930 census as the owner and manager of a hotel. She and her descendants ran the Belmont and its attached sister hotel, the Hearne, for more than a hundred years; the Belmont-Hearne was reputed to be the last hotel in Ocean City serving the American Plan, and was demolished in November 2004 for the Belmont Towers condominium. George Mills, a Black hotel worker, was boarding in her household in 1930.
In the record (1)
1930
The census returns name the Black women who cooked and kept house for the resort: Sarah L. Bassitt, Alice Pitts, Mary Dennis.
Domestic work was one of the few trades open to Black women in Ocean City, and the census is where their names survive. Sarah L. Bassitt, 59, was recorded as a cook in 1900; Alice Pitts, 35, in 1910; Mary Dennis, 27, in 1930, cooking for a hotel. Clara Showell and her daughter Julia were washerwomen and Clara's daughter Sarah a cook. Others were live-in servants for private families — Roxy P. Ayres in Thomas J. Cropper's household in 1930, Roketta Scott and Chancil Whittington in John B. Lynch's in 1940, Edward Purnell a hired hand a few doors along. George Mills, listed as both a servant and a hotel worker, boarded with Lizzie R. Hearne, who is recorded in the same 1930 census as the owner and manager of a hotel. At the Monticello, George Henry Booth lived in and kept house; his 1942 draft card notes a withered leg.
The hotels are named all over this timeline. These are the people who made the beds and the breakfasts in them, and a census line is the only place most of their names got written down.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Sarah L. BassittAlice PittsMary DennisGeorge MillsThomas J. Cropper
Source · checked 2026-08-11