History

Sam Ludlam

Ocean City property owner · active 1938

The owner of the Ocean City property to which Charles C. Richards proposed, in April 1938, to build an addition for a Colored Recreation Hall. Where the property stood is not recorded. A Mrs. Charles Ludlam appears separately in the town's 1938 assessment list at $1,000.

In the record (1)

  1. 1938 · 1938-04-04

    In April 1938 a man applied to Ocean City for a permit to build a Colored Recreation Hall, and the neighbours objected before the council had said a word

    The minute of Monday evening 4 April 1938 reads: 'Application of Chas. C. Richards for permit to build Addition to Sam Ludlam property for Colored recreation Hall was presented and being that Trimper Bros. Mrs. Charles Hudson and Mrs Nancy Truitt objected the Council instructed the Secretary to write Mr. Richards that the Surrounding property owners objected and if he still wanted to obtain permit all owners would be notified & time set for a hearing on same, provided he made new application on blank form which would be supplied by Secretary.' It is the second Black institution the campaign has ever found in Ocean City, after the colored dance hall of 1937, and the first it can watch from the beginning. Richards was not building from nothing: he proposed an ADDITION to a standing building, Sam Ludlam's property, which means a hall was to be made out of something already there. And the objection arrived with the application. Three neighbours are named before the council has taken any view of its own, and one of them is Trimper Bros., the boardwalk amusement firm that is still in business today.

    The council's answer was procedural and it was not a refusal: fill in the proper form and we will notify everyone and hold a hearing. That is the machinery of a fair process. What it produced, seven months later, was a unanimous no.

    Charles C. RichardsMrs. Nancy TruittMrs. Charles Hudson

    Source · checked 2026-08-11