History

Mrs. Martha Miller

Boarding-house keeper, Ocean City · active 1931-1932

An elderly Black woman who kept a boarding house at Ocean City, Md., where Euel Lee (alias Orphan Jones) lodged when he was in the town. Lee was arrested at her house on 12 October 1931, the day after the Green K. Davis family was found murdered near Berlin, and she became the State's principal witness against him — identifying a shotgun, a pistol, a satchel, stockings, women's underwear, jewellery and dresses belonging to the two Davis daughters as having been in his room, and testifying that he had displayed a large sum of money. She was brought to Baltimore by the defence before the first trial and questioned by Bernard Ades at his office. At the retrial at Towson in September 1932 she was cursed and threatened by two young men as she left the circuit court, and Baltimore County policemen guarded her home overnight; the press called her 'Aunt Martha'. She is the first named Black resident of Ocean City, Maryland the campaign has found in any source since 1904, and the only Black-run Ocean City business the record names.