Oden Bowie
Governor of Maryland · 1826–1894
Governor of Maryland 1869-1872. In July 1871 he issued the proclamation required by Article III of the Maryland Constitution that fixed each county's delegation in the General Assembly on the basis of the 1870 federal census — the document that puts Worcester County's 1870 population, 16,419, into the contemporary public record.
In the record (1)
1870 · 1870-06-01
The Ninth Census counts 16,419 people in Worcester County — and not one of them on the beach that becomes Ocean City.
The federal census of June 1, 1870 put Worcester County at 16,419, a figure Gov. Oden Bowie certified the following summer in the constitutional apportionment proclamation that set each county's delegation in the General Assembly (Somerset 18,190; Wicomico 15,802; Worcester 16,419). Read against 1860's 20,661 that looks like a fifth of the county gone, and Northern papers duly blamed the war — but the drop is mostly a boundary artifact: Wicomico County had been carved out of Worcester and Somerset in 1867. Maryland's own returns, printed in December 1870, made the correction explicit: Somerset and Worcester together held 46,653 people in 1860; Somerset, Worcester and Wicomico together held 50,516 in 1870, a real gain of 4,863. Nobody was enumerated on the barrier beach. The nearest households were across Sinepuxent Bay in the Berlin election district, and the only structures on the sand were a cottage or two belonging to the Coffin family.
Ocean City's population in the last census before it existed: zero, on paper and in fact.
Source · checked 2026-08-06