History

Robert Fowler

financier; Maryland state treasurer (former) · 1812–1874

The man who put the first money on the table for Ocean City. At the July 1873 meeting on Synepuxent Beach, Robert Fowler 'offered to give $5,000' toward the proposed $25,000 summer hotel — a fifth of the whole projected cost, pledged before a site had even been chosen. Two independent 1872 papers style him "Ex-State Treasurer of Maryland," which matches the Maryland State Archives biography — born 1812, Treasurer 1862–70, a stockholder in the Maryland Hotel and Barnum's. He floated a hotel on Coffin's Beach in October 1872, nine months before the July 1873 meeting on the sand at which he pledged $5,000. He died on 3 March 1874, sixteen months before the Atlantic Hotel opened.

In the record (1)

  1. 1872

    Robert Fowler, ex-Treasurer of Maryland, is about to build a hotel on Coffin's Beach — the future Ocean City site, three years before the Atlantic.

    A one-line peninsula item carried by at least two papers in late October 1872 — the Wilmington Daily Gazette of October 22 and the Baltimore County Union of October 26 — reports a project "to erect a hotel opposite Berlin, Worcester county, on Coffin's Beach." The barrier strand opposite Berlin is the future Ocean City, and "Coffin's Beach" is the name it went by from Isaac Coffin's cottage/inn, the only guest lodging then on the sand. The promoters' names sit in an adjacent column that the newspaper OCR does not recover, and nothing indicates the hotel was built: the Atlantic Hotel Company did not incorporate and name the town until 1875. THE PROMOTER IS NAMED, AND THERE IS ONLY ONE: "Robert Fowler, Esq., Ex-State Treasurer, of Maryland, is about to erect a hotel opposite Berlin, Worcester Co., on Coffin's Beach" (Wilmington Daily Gazette, 22 Oct 1872, p. 4; the Baltimore County Union of 26 Oct credits the Wilmington Tribune as origin). The campaign had assumed a lost column of several promoters' names; the page shows a single man. He is the same Robert Fowler who pledged $5,000 at the July 1873 meeting on the beach — so the 1873 'conception' meeting is a second run at a scheme he had already floated nine months earlier.

    Somebody was pitching a hotel on that beach in 1872. The one that got built in 1875 was not the first idea — just the first one with a railroad behind it.

    Isaac Coffin Cottage SiteThe BeachIsaac Coffin

    Source · checked 2026-08-06