Stephen Taber

In the record (12)

1. 1869 · 1869-01-15

   Maryland patents the 280-acre beach tract "The Lady's Resort to the Ocean" to Stephen Taber and Hepburn S. Benson.

   The land Ocean City was later built on entered private hands as a state land patent. Maryland Court of Appeals findings in Mayor of Ocean City v. Taber (1977) recite the patent as issued January 15, 1869 to Stephen Taber and Hepburn S. Benson for 280 acres of ocean beach in Worcester County, recorded in the Hall of Records at Liber W.L. & W.S. No. 2, folios 326-327. Taber bought out Benson's interest by deed of October 9, 1871; in 1876 Taber and his wife conveyed to trustees who sold the resort lots, and in 1878 the trustees conveyed a parcel to the United States for the life-saving station. Some popular histories date the patent to 1867 — recorded here as a conflict, not resolved.

   Six years before there was a town, there was a deed — and the name on it was a New Yorker's.

   patented 1869 (some accounts say 1867) — sources differ

   Hepburn S. Benson

   Source · checked 2026-08-06

2. 1871

   In 1871 the future Ocean City is a privately owned, unbuilt strand: the 280-acre 'Lady's Resort to the Ocean' tract, patented in 1869 to Stephen Taber and Hepburn S. Benson.

   There was no town, no boardwalk, and no 'Ocean City' in 1871 — the name would be bestowed by the Atlantic Hotel Company in 1875. The Maryland Court of Appeals later recited the chain of title: on January 15, 1869, Stephen Taber and Hepburn S. Benson obtained a patent from the State of Maryland for 'The Lady's Resort to the Ocean,' a 280-acre tract along the Atlantic in Worcester County. Taber, a wealthy Long Island businessman, came to hold over 1,500 acres of the Worcester County coast. Not until July 28, 1876 did Taber deed the roughly fifty-acre town parcel to trustees Hillary R. Pitts, Benjamin Jones Taylor and George W. Purnell to sell lots; the original plat laid out about 205 building lots between what are now South and North Division Streets.

   The town's legal birth certificate is a land patent with a better name than the town ended up with.

   The Beach

   Source · checked 2026-08-05

3. 1875 · 1875-07-27

   Before the first season ended, a second hotel was announced — by Taber and Coffin, the two names already on this beach.

   "The [Salisbury] Advertiser learns from good authority that Messrs. Tabor & Coffin will erect another large hotel on the beach at Ocean City. It will be completed and opened for guests for the Centennial season," the Wilmington Daily Commercial reported on July 27, 1875. Both names are already in this dataset: Stephen Taber held the 1869 state patent for "The Lady's Resort to the Ocean," the 280-acre tract that became the town, and Isaac Coffin is the man traditionally credited with the Rhode Island Inn, the beach's first paying lodging. By September the Salisbury Advertiser had a second report: "There will probably be another hotel erected at Ocean City, as a party of Wilmington and Salisbury gentlemen have been prospecting for a suitable site. It will be completed by next season."

   The town was two months old and already had a rival hotel scheme — run by the landowner and the innkeeper who were there before the company arrived.

   Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.

   Isaac Coffin

   Source · checked 2026-08-06

4. 1877

   Stephen Taber gives Bishop Lay a lot for Ocean City's first church, and the bishop spends the summer preaching in the Atlantic Hotel parlor.

   "Right Rev. H. C. Lay, Bishop of the diocese of Easton, has preached several times at Ocean City this season in the large parlor of the Atlantic Hotel," the Middletown Transcript reported on September 1, 1877. In the same column: "Hon. Stephen Taber, of Roslyn, N.Y., has donated one of his most eligible lots at Ocean City to Bishop Lay, for the erection thereon of an Episcopal Church, which will be erected before the next bathing season sets in." Taber is the New York congressman who, with Hepburn S. Benson, had patented the 280-acre beach tract "The Lady's Resort to the Ocean" in 1869 and still owned lots in the town he had helped create.

   Ocean City's religious life began where everything else did — in the Atlantic Hotel's parlor. The lot came from the man who had owned the sand before there was a town on it.

   Atlantic HotelRt. Rev. Henry Champlin Lay

   Source · checked 2026-08-06

5. 1880 · 1880-04-10

   The 1880 charter draws the town as a strip between two Stephen Taber deeds, anchored on the Ocean City Bridge Company's bridge.

   Section 2 of Chapter 209 fixes the corporate limits: "Beginning at a point in Synepuxent Bay at or near the easternmost end of the Ocean City Bridge Company's bridge," south along the bay to the south line of the land Stephen Taber conveyed to Granville Stokes by deed of August 28, 1879, east across Atlantic Avenue to the ocean, north along the surf to the north line of the land Taber conveyed to Hillary E. Pitts, Benjamin Jones Taylor and George W. Purnell, trustees, by deed of July 28, 1876, then north 76 1/8 degrees west across the beach to the bay and back down to the bridge. The commissioners were ordered to have "a survey made by a competent surveyor of all the streets and avenues of said town" and to set a stone at the north and south sides of every east-west street at its intersection with Atlantic Avenue. The original town of Ocean City is, legally, the ground between two parcels Stephen Taber sold — the same New York congressman who patented the 280-acre beach tract in 1869.

   Ocean City Bridge CompanyThe Commissioners of Ocean CityDr. Hilary R. PittsB. Jones TaylorGranville StokesGeorge W. Purnell

   Source · checked 2026-08-06

6. 1886 · 1886-04-07

   Maryland empowers the Commissioners of Ocean City to extend the town half a mile north and half a mile south.

   Chapter 474 of the Acts of 1886, approved April 7, empowered "the Commissioners of the town of Ocean City, Worcester county" to extend the town's bounds in two pieces. The northern extension began at the Atlantic Ocean end of the line of the land Stephen Taber conveyed to Hilary R. Pitts, Benjamin Jones Taylor and George W. Purnell, trustees, by deed of July 28, 1876 — "and now the northern limit of said town" — and ran a half mile north along the ocean, west to Synepuxent Bay, and back. The southern extension ran a half mile south from the original south boundary, bay to ocean. Section 2 required the commissioners to have the additional territory "carefully surveyed and marked." The act is permissive: it grants power to extend, and no source found in this pass shows the survey being made or the extension taking effect.

   Six years after Ocean City was incorporated inside a rectangle of somebody else's farmland, the state handed the town a mile of new beach — and this is the first act of the Maryland General Assembly ever addressed to Ocean City's own municipal government rather than to the men who owned it.

   The Commissioners of Ocean CityDr. Hilary R. PittsB. Jones TaylorGeorge W. Purnell

   Source · checked 2026-08-06

7. 1890 · 1890-08-28

   August 1890: a syndicate of railroad stockholders buys the whole Taber estate around Ocean City, intending 'to build a city on this site.'

   'A gigantic land scheme is projected near Ocean City by a syndicate of capitalists, consisting of the stockholders of the Baltimore and Eastern Shore Railroad Company and Baltimore and Washington monied men,' the Wilmington Evening Journal reported on August 28, 1890. 'Robert Goldsborough Keene, of Baltimore, has arranged for the syndicate to purchase the entire estate of the late Stephen Taber, which joins Ocean City on the north and south, and lies in addition to its fine ocean front about fifteen miles of the bay shore of the Isle of Wight and the Synepuxent bay, and is one of the most beautiful spots on the coast. The intention is to build a city on this site. The scheme for the expansion and development of the new city is on the most elaborate and comprehensive scale, and the prospect is that on its completion Maryland will have as fine a beach as there is in the United States. It will be a winter as well as a summer resort.' Stephen Taber was the Long Island investor who had patented 'The Lady's Resort to the Ocean' in 1869 and sold the founders their beach in 1876; twenty-one years after the patent, his heirs' land was bought whole by the men who owned the railroad, and the modern island north of the original town was on the drawing board.

   The BeachBaltimore and Eastern Shore RailroadSinepuxent Beach Company

   Source · checked 2026-08-06

8. 1893

   The town sells lots at auction for six years of unpaid corporation taxes, and the notices name Ocean City's tax collector and its Board of Commissioners.

   Through the first half of 1893 the Democratic Messenger carried, week after week, collector's sale notices signed "BALDWIN F. WILLIAMS, Collector of Corporation Taxes for Ocean City." The first ran from March 4 against Lot No. 129, seized for taxes owed "to the Board of Commissioners of said Ocean City" for the years 1887, 1888, 1889, 1890, 1891 and 1892 — six consecutive years unpaid. The lot is described as being "on the North Corner of Caroline Street and Philadelphia Avenue, and is described as Lot No. 129 on the plat of said Ocean City filed among the land records of said Worcester County with the deed from Stephen Taber and wife to Hilary B. Pitts, B. Jones Taylor and George W. Purnell as Trustees" — the founders' 1876 purchase, still the town's root of title. A Circuit Court order nisi of August 17, 1893 ratifying the sale records the lot as assessed to Edward W. LeCompte "(and alleged to be the property of the heirs of James A. Stewart, deceased)" at Liber I.T.M. No. 4, folio 538. A second round of notices ran from April 29 against Lots 81 and 194 for 1890–1892 taxes, sold on the premises May 27, and a third against Lot 183, assessed to Manners, Fisher & Co., sold July 22.

   The Commissioners of Ocean CityBaldwin F. WilliamsGeorge W. PurnellDr. Hilary R. PittsB. Jones Taylor

   Source · checked 2026-08-06

9. 1895

   Lots inside the original fifty acres — the ground Stephen Taber deeded to the founders' trustees on July 28, 1876 — go to auction in the Atlantic Hotel, and a bayfront-to-oceanfront block is cut into seven lots.

   A trustees' advertisement ran in the Democratic Messenger through July and August 1895: a sale "at the Atlantic Hotel at Ocean City in said Worcester County, on SATURDAY, August 17th, 1895, sale commencing at 3 o'clock p. m., all those lots of land situated at said Ocean City within the original fifty acres as laid off by Stephen Taber by deed to Hillary R. Pitts, Benjamin Jones Taylor and Geo. W. Purnell, Trustees, dated the twenty eighth day of July in the year eighteen hundred and seventy six, recorded among the land records of said Worcester County in liber I. T. M. No. 4 folios 536, 537 and 538, and are described on the plat filed in the office of the Clerk of the Circuit Court for Worcester County." That deed is the founding conveyance of Ocean City, and its date and recording reference are recovered here from an auction notice nineteen years later. The market above it was busier: the paper of August 31 advertised a block at the corner of a numbered street and Baltimore Avenue "divided into seven desirable building lots, the usual size 50x100 feet each, and sold at reasonable prices. Ocean City is booming and there are very few desirable locations purchasable. These lots, especially the ocean front lots, are the best located on the beach."

   Atlantic HotelDr. Hilary R. PittsB. Jones TaylorGeorge W. Purnell

   Source · checked 2026-08-06

10. 1896 · 1896-10-12

    The October 1896 storm washes away the board walk from Congress Hall to the south end — the first documented destruction of Ocean City's boardwalk.

    Under the head "A DISASTROUS STORM — Ocean City Cottages Surrounded by Water and the Surf Beats Over the Beach," the Democratic Messenger of October 17, 1896 printed a dispatch from Ocean City written on Monday, October 12: "This has been a very stormy day at Ocean City, the tide having washed all the boardwalk away from Congress Hall down to the south end. A portion of the walk above the Atlantic Hotel is up. The Stokes and Taber cottages are surrounded by water. Mrs. Stokes moved over to the mainland. All the cottage people have left the front, except Captain Hobbs, of the Eastern Shore House, and Trimper, of the Seabright Hotel." The tennis court was washed away; "no material damage was done to the Colonial or Maryland cottages." The dispatch closes: "At 3.45 o'clock this afternoon the storm was about over, but the surf was still breaking over the beach. All the board walk south of the life-saving station has been torn up, but not much damage was done to other property." Two structural details come free: the front walk stood "about ten feet higher than the bay," and "the Atlantic Casino is all right and the walk in front of it intact." The paper credits the town's relative escape to shoals "about five miles east of Ocean City" on which "all the tremendous gales which wreck the Jersey coast spend their fury." This fills the campaign's 1896 gap in the board-walk thread and dates the walk's extent: a continuous front walk running past the Atlantic Hotel and the life-saving station, from Congress Hall to the south end of town. — 1896 FULL PASS, 2026-08-11 [confirmed]: Confirmed, and the north end the record was missing is now partly supplied — by a second dispatch on the same page that the 1896 pass did not use. The Monday dispatch gives the south: 'the tide having washed all the boardwalk away from Congress Hall down to the south end. A portion of the walk above the Atlantic Hotel is up.' A later dispatch dated Oct. 15 gives another landmark: 'At 3.45 o'clock this afternoon the storm was about over, but the surf was still breaking over the beach. All the board walk south of the life-saving station has been torn up, but not much damage was done to other property.' The rest of the inventory: 'The Stokes and Taber cottages are surrounded by water. Mrs. Stokes moved over to the mainland. All the cottage people have left the front, except Captain Hobbs, of the Eastern Shore House, and Trimper, of the Seabright Hotel. Congress Hall is surrounded. The kitchen chimney of the Plimhimmon Hotel was blown down and broke the roof in. The tennis court is washed away. No material damage was done to the Colonial or Maryland cottages nor any of the cottages along the front. The walk between the Atlantic Hotel and the Meyer's cottage is nearly all gone, the bank cut away, and the water, which runs over the bank with the high tide, flows back to Baltimore avenue, as the front walk is about ten feet higher than the bay is generally.' And the paper's explanation for why the town got off lightly: 'Ocean City, as usual, has fared better than most of the ocean resorts, owing to the presence of "Little and Great Gull shoals," about five miles east of Ocean City.'

    Granville Stokes

    Source · checked 2026-08-06

11. 1896 · 1896-12-12

    A life-saving surfman buys the Synepuxent House and its livery stable for $2,470, and thirty-six Taber estate lots are sold off the bay side.

    Two sales bracket the year's property record. In August the Ocean City column reported: "A sale of Ocean City lots took place. Thirty-six lots, lying on the bay side of the beach and belonging to the estate of Stephen Taber, deceased — George W. Purnell and George M. Upshur, trustees — were all readily disposed of at satisfactory prices. John Walter Smith, of Snow Hill, bought ten of the lots and James W. Owens bought several. The rest were purchased by residents of Ocean City or vicinity." The newly elected mayor was one of the trustees selling; the state senator was the largest buyer. In December, out of the estate of Isaac S. Jones, "Mr. William Taylor, of Ocean City Life Saving Station, purchased the Sinepuxent House and lot, also the livery stable and lot, each 40x80 feet, at Ocean City of Calvin B. Taylor at public sale last Saturday. He paid $2470 for the two lots, which was considered a good price." A surfman buying a hotel is the clearest single measure of what beach property was worth, and to whom, in 1896. Smaller transfers that year run from $28 for a tax-sale lot to $900 for lot No. 17 with improvements; Sarah Ann Lynch paid $330 in August for lot No. 6 in Block 15 that William W. Bigger had bought from the Sinepuxent Beach Company for $100 in February. — 1896 FULL PASS, 2026-08-11 [confirmed]: Confirmed, with the December buyer identified by occupation. The Messenger of 19 December 1896: 'Mr. William Taylor, of Ocean City Life Saving Station, purchased the Sinepuxent House and lot, also the livery stable and lot, each 40x80 feet, at Ocean City of Calvin B. Taylor at public sale last Saturday. He paid $2470 for the two lots, which was considered a good price.' The purchaser was a serving surfman of the Ocean City station buying a hotel and a livery stable — which is a fact about what federal surfmen's pay and standing could buy on this beach, and it belongs to the life-saving thread as much as to the property record. He or his namesake would offer the same Sinepuxent House at auction in 1908.

    Sinepuxent Beach CompanyGeorge W. PurnellJohn Walter Smith

    Source · checked 2026-08-06

12. 1918

    A trustee's sale reveals the State took 6.2 of the 9.9 acres of the Taber "Hommock" opposite Ocean City for the bridge.

    A sale notice run in the Messenger through July 1918 describes land "lying on the westerly side of Synepuxent Bay, opposite Ocean City, called 'Hommock,' which was conveyed to the said Sarah E. Taber by George W. Purnell, trustee, by deed dated the 20th of June, 1898 ... except so much thereof as was condemned by the State of Maryland at the instance of the State Roads Commission, under proceedings instituted in Case No. 5 on the Miscellaneous Docket of the October Term, 1916, of the Circuit Court for Worcester County; said deed from said trustee calling for 9 and 9-10 acres, more or less, and said proceedings of condemnation taking 6 and 2-10 acres, more or less; leaving 3 and 7-10 acres." The remainder is bounded by "a lot lying near the westerly end of the railroad bridge and belonging to The Farms Company." The same notice offered "lot No. seven (7) on the original plat of Ocean City." This is the mainland end of the bay bridge, taken by eminent domain from the family of Stephen Taber -- the man who patented the beach and sold the lots that made the town in 1875 -- to build the road that would end its dependence on his railroad.

    Maryland State Roads CommissionGeorge W. Purnell

    Source · checked 2026-08-06