Atlantic Hotel

The take

Ocean City literally begins here: the Atlantic opened on July 4, 1875, and the town grew up around it. The great fire of December 1925 leveled it along with three downtown blocks; it was rebuilt the next year and never left. The Purnell family has run it since 1923 — a century and counting.

Heritage context

• Sinepuxent Beach Company

  Founded 1890 · active today

  The development company that platted the island beyond the original 1875 resort. Incorporated in December 1890 by Robert G. Keene, Dr. J. Pembroke Thom, Samuel C. Rowland and Charles A. Coombs, with capital stock of $60,000 stated to represent the purchase price of the land. It owned eight miles of beach on Sinepuxent Bay adjoining Ocean City at the terminus of the Baltimore and Eastern Shore Railroad — some 2,000 acres, assembled that August out of the estate of the late Stephen Taber — and had it topographically surveyed and laid out into building lots divided by streets and avenues, with wharves and an electric railway contemplated. Directors for the first year were the incorporators together with Joseph B. Seth (president of the railroad), Edward Austin Jenkins, John F. Waggaman of Washington and Gabriel E. Duvall; Thom was elected president, Theophilus Tunis (the railroad's secretary) vice-president and J. Frank Turner secretary and treasurer. The street grid north of the original town descends from this survey. The company later acquired the Atlantic Hotel Company's holdings; the dates given for that in retrospectives (1891, 1892) are unsettled.

• Atlantic Hotel Company

  Founded 1868 · active today

  The corporation that built Ocean City — chartered not in 1875 but seven years earlier. Chapter 29 of the January session of 1868 of the Maryland General Assembly incorporated Lemuel Showell, James C. Dirickson, Henry B. Johnson and B. Jones Taylor to build a seaside hotel, 'provided the point selected be not over eight miles from the town of Berlin' — the clause that determined where Ocean City would be (the site is seven). The company sat on the licence for five years; a July 1873 meeting on the beach revived it, the land was bought in September 1873, and the 400-room Atlantic Hotel opened in the summer of 1875 on land patented as 'The Ladies' Resort to the Ocean.' Its holdings passed to the Sinepuxent Beach Company in the early 1890s.

• American Resort Hotel Company

  1910-

  Syndicate that took over the whole of the Ocean City Beach Company's holdings on Sinepuxent Beach — 'all the hotel properties, equipments, etc.' — in a transfer recorded in Worcester County at the beginning of February 1910. The county paper described it as 'composed of first-class hotel men and eminent capitalists who have made a success of seaside resort hotels', owning houses at Palm Beach, Jacksonville, Atlantic City and other Atlantic Coast resorts, and named Henry M. Flagler as one of its stockholders. It undertook to pay off the Beach Company's indebtedness at once and to put carpenters and mechanics to work repairing, painting and remodelling the Atlantic Hotel, the Seaside Hotel and the rest of the property, with the declared intention of making Ocean City a winter resort as well as a summer one. Its ownership of the Atlantic is independently confirmed in September 1910, when a visitor who fell down the hotel's elevator shaft sued the company for $10,000. Nothing came of the winter-resort plan in 1910: the Atlantic closed for the season in the first week of September as it always had.

• Maryland Press Association

  1913

  State newspapermen's association which held its semi-annual meeting at the Atlantic Hotel, Ocean City, in July 1913. Its president, Col. William S. Powell, was absent and tendered his resignation on retiring as a publisher; the vice-president, Charles O. Melvin of Pocomoke City, called the meeting to order, and W. Meade Holladay of Annapolis was elected president with John E. Raine of Towson added to the executive committee. Ocean City's role as the Eastern Shore's convention town is the reason it met there — the Peninsular Press Association had been meeting on the same beach since the 1880s.

• Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Maryland

  Founded 1876 · active today

  The Maryland department of the W.C.T.U., which held its forty-fifth annual state convention at the Atlantic Hotel, Ocean City, 28-30 September 1920 — in the first year of national Prohibition, and in a county that had gone dry twelve years earlier. Delegates from the western counties assembled at Annapolis at eight on the Tuesday morning and crossed by the Claiborne ferry, picking up Eastern Shore delegations at stations down the line. Mrs. Mary Haslup was state president; the convention's climax was an address on Prohibition by Dr. Daniel Poling, who arrived through a driving rain, delivered in "the spacious parlors of the hotel" with a male quartette that had come through the storm from Salisbury. Maryland then had about thirty-five Loyal Temperance Legions; the Carrollton Legion took second place and a pennant.

• Home Rule Convention of the Eastern Shore of Maryland

  Founded 1925 · active today

  A states'-rights and anti-Prohibition convention convened at the Atlantic Hotel, Ocean City, on Saturday 29 August 1925, with delegations from nine Eastern Shore counties and a call signed by representative citizens of each. Senator William Cabell Bruce was the chief speaker and Congressman John Philip Hill also took part. The Worcester Democrat called it "the Eastern Shore's first organized interest in States' rights." Its resolutions demanded that Congress stop concentrating control at Washington; that all federal power over education, roads and "the prohibition or regulation of alcoholic liquors" be repealed; and declared "unalterable opposition to the proposed child labor amendment."