History

Wilton R. May

patrolman, Ocean City · active 1929

The Ocean City patrolman detailed, on information relayed from the state police at Salisbury, to keep under surveillance a man observed making frequent trips up and down the beach before Christmas 1929 — the watch that preceded the liquor seizure of 30 December. He went with Chief Robert Allen and a squad of Coast Guardsmen to the farmhouse on Sinepuxent Bay.

In the record (1)

  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 GuardRobert Allen

    Source · checked 2026-08-06