Robert Allen

In the record (3)

1. 1929

   Coast Guardsmen take a cargo of Canadian liquor off the beach below Ocean City on 30 December, and twenty-three men end the year in the town jail — fourteen of them Ocean City men.

   Two duck hunters, shortly before daybreak, saw small boats lightering a cargo from a 50-ton motor trawler to the beach several miles south of Ocean City. They notified the North Beach Coast Guard station, which relayed the message to the station at Ocean City; the men sent drew their pistols and told the crowd working the boats and the beach that they were under arrest, though several broke away and escaped. The trawler weighed anchor and got away before a boat could be found to chase it. More than 500 cases were piled on a deserted spot on the beach, and about 1,300 more were found with four men in a farmhouse on the Purnell farm four miles away up Sinepuxent Bay, where Robert Allen, chief of police of Ocean City, went with Patrolman Wilton R. May and a squad of Coast Guardsmen; the liquor was stored on the second floor of the frame dwelling, which a stranger had rented some weeks before. Twenty-one of the twenty-three men held gave their names: James Bradford, Dorsey Cropper, E. Parsons, N. Lynch, O. Powell, E. Quillen, Walter Redding, H. Gibson, D. Harmon, J. E. Quillen, C. Harmon, R. Faraum, J. C. Quillen and H. Wooten, all of Ocean City; H. Powell, C. Johnson and L. Cathell of Taylorsville; E. J. Miller of Trenton, N.J.; and George Bolton, Sam Hall and Edward Murphy of Philadelphia. A new truck, two automobiles, a light speedboat and a small yacht were seized with the liquor. State police at Salisbury had been watching for the cargo since before Christmas, on information from Baltimore that a boat was due with holiday liquor and had been delayed by weather, and Patrolman May had been detailed to watch a man seen making frequent trips up and down the beach.

   Fourteen of the twenty-one named men are Ocean City men. This is not a story about outsiders using an empty beach; it is a story about what a resort town did in the dead of winter, with a distribution point for Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington set up in a rented farmhouse four miles up the bay. It is the largest crime story the campaign has for the town in this decade, and it lands in the last forty-eight hours of the year.

   United States Coast GuardWilton R. May

   Source · checked 2026-08-06

2. 1932 · 1932-01-20

   Euel Lee, arrested at an Ocean City boarding house, is convicted at Towson of murdering the Davis family of Worcester County; the town's chief of police is accused in open court of planting the evidence.

   Euel Lee, alias Orphan Jones, a Black farm labourer of about sixty, was arrested "at the home of a negro woman in Ocean City where he had frequently boarded" the day after the bodies of Green K. Davis, his wife and two daughters were found axed to death at their farm near Berlin on 11 October 1931. Ocean City's chief of police, Robert Allen, made the arrest; the prisoner had to be taken to Baltimore "to avoid a mob at Snow Hill who demanded that they be given a chance to lynch him." The trial was removed from Worcester County to the Baltimore County Circuit Court at Towson, where it opened on 18 January 1932 with Bernard Ades of the International Labor Defense, David Levinson of Philadelphia and Eli Schwarzblatt of New York for the defence. The jury, all white, convicted in the first degree on 20 January after 34 minutes. Washington Times, 20 January: "Charges that the State attempted to 'frame' Orphan Jones... were made today by David Levinson, of Philadelphia, and Bernard Ades... Police Chief Robert Allen, of Ocean City, Md., was blamed by the attorneys in summing up the defense, as the one responsible for substituting evidence." Chief Allen was recalled to testify "concerning the 'hitting' of Lee in the automobile" and admitted the prisoner had been struck. The state's chief witness was Mrs. Martha Miller, an aged Black woman who kept the Ocean City boarding house and identified the shotgun, pistol, satchel, clothing and jewellery found in Lee's room. In February the Baltimore County judges refused a new trial and sentenced him to hang.

   One of the most consequential criminal cases in Maryland history, and it starts at an Ocean City boarding house. It also breaks the campaign's longest silence: since 1904 not one Black resident of Ocean City, Maryland has been named in any source. Here are two — Mrs. Martha Miller, who kept a boarding house in the town, and James Fawsitt, who talked with Lee near an Ocean City bridge — and they are named because a white newspaper needed them as witnesses in a capital case. The Black press names them too, and treats the Ocean City police very differently from the way the Washington dailies do.

   Source · checked 2026-08-10

3. 1941 · 1941-12-11

   Four days after Pearl Harbor and on the day Germany declared war, the Ocean City council sat down and organised a home defence council — eleven departments, twenty-two names, and a Department of Evacuation.

   The 1940 minute book does not mention the war once, in the year of the fall of France. The 1941 book does not mention it either — until 11 December. The council met at 7:15 on Thursday evening with Mayor C. P. Cropper and Councilmen Harold Rayne and Raymond Bounds, granted a building permit to Chas. S. Powell for a two-apartment dwelling on the alley between 11th and 12th Streets, let the English Diner move to a site next to the Post Office on Dr. Chas. W. Purnell's ground, and resolved to borrow from the Bank of Ocean City to meet bonds and coupons due 1 January. Then: 'Mr. S. Earl Tromley, John I. Timmons and Miss Lena Riggin were present to help in organizeing home defence council and the following were selected to head the orginization.' Those three were not helpful neighbours. As the Worcester Democrat printed a week later, they were the entire executive of the Worcester County Council of Defense — Tromley its Executive Director, Timmons its Chief Air Raid Warden, and Miss Lena H. Riggin its Executive Secretary, all three of Snow Hill — going town to town. They were carrying an order. The same paper prints the telegram that sent them: 'Supplementing my telegram December 10, immediate arrangements must be made to hold blackouts just as quickly as possible. No delay in this matter, as conditions are very serious. Let me know when ready. Col. Henry Barrett, Director of air raid Precaution Service for Maryland.' The roster Ocean City adopted that night, verbatim from the minute: John B. Lynch, Commander. Harold Rayne and L. B. Cropper, Dept. of Public Safety. J. M. Mumford and Robert Allen, Dept. of Public Works. Dr. F. J. Townsend and Guy R. P. Dennis, Dept. Public Health. Archie Davis and Morris Peacock, Dept. Fire Protection. D. Trimper Sr. and Denard Baker, Dept. Transporation. Arthur Davis and Preston Laws, Dept. Gen. Supplies. Rev. Dewees and F. W. Truitt, Dept. Evacuation. Willie Ludlam and Gladys Jackson, Red Cross. E. M. Scott and Chas. J. Jackson, Communication. Bob Jackson and Wm. H. Purnell, Air Wardens. The council adjourned at eleven. Pocomoke City's mayor and council met specially the same Thursday evening and resolved to organise a Civilian Defense Corps of their own, and Pocomoke's published department list — Public Safety, Evacuation, Transportation, Communications, Public Works, Fire Protection, General Supply, Public Health — is the same scheme under the same headings. So the eleven departments were a template handed down, not a local invention; what Ocean City supplied was twenty-two names, and the names are the whole value of the document. By 18 December the county could report that Home Defense Corps in Snow Hill, Pocomoke City, Berlin and Ocean City were 'now complete in every detail', and Mayor Clifford P. Cropper sat on the county council himself.

   Ocean City Home Defense CouncilWorcester County Council of DefenseBank of Ocean CityClifford P. CropperHarold J. RayneE. Raymond BoundsJohn B. LynchS. Earl TromleyMiss Lena H. RigginGladys JacksonMorris PeacockWillie LudlamFrancis J. TownsendArchie DavisL. B. CropperJ. M. MumfordDaniel Trimper, Sr.W. Preston LawsF. W. TruittEdward M. ScottWilliam H. Purnell

   Source · checked 2026-08-11