Plimhimmon Hotel / Plim Plaza

The take

Rosalie Tilghman Shreve — widowed by the Civil War, then a businesswoman — put up one of the town's first three grand hotels, and a woman running one was headline material in the 1890s. The Harrison family bought it in 1970 and the Plim Plaza carries it on. Look up from the boards at 2nd St and you're looking at the 1890s.

Heritage context

• Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland

  Founded 1799 · active today

  Maryland's state medical society, chartered in 1799. It held a session at the Plimhimmon Hotel in Ocean City on Saturday 10 September 1904 at which papers were read by Drs. Harry C. Hyde, E. N. Brush, Herbert Harlan, Jeffries Buck, George W. Dobbin, A. D. Atkinson, F. J. Kirby, E. J. Dirickson, William T. Watson, Guy Steele and William D. Straughn, among others — one more body added to the run of state conventions that had been coming to the resort since 1898.

• Association of Medical Societies of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Delaware and Virginia

  Founded 1917 · active today

  A tri-state association of county medical societies covering the Delmarva peninsula. Its third annual meeting was held on Thursday 24 July 1919 in the state school building at Ocean City, with the banquet at the Plimhimmon Hotel at half past nine that night; Dr. George W. Todd of Salisbury was president, and the Messenger noted that many of the doctors brought their wives.

• Plimhimmon Hotel Company of Worcester County

  by 1922

  The corporation holding the Plimhimmon Hotel at Ocean City, revealed by Chapter 475 of the Maryland Acts of 1922, which validated Rosalie Tilghman Shreve's bequest of "stock of the par value of five thousand dollars in the Plimhimmon Hotel Company of Worcester County, Maryland" to the Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Easton, towards the maintenance of the vacation clergy house she left it on Baltimore Avenue. The hotel had been built by Shreve in 1894 as one of Ocean City's first three grand houses; that it had been incorporated by the time of her death was not previously in this registry. In 1922 the Plimhimmon advertised in Washington with a ballroom, the Morris Orchestra and a grill room.

• Board of Trade of Ocean City

  Founded 1922 · active today

  Organised in the autumn of 1922 with J. Edgar Ijams as president, the Board of Trade was Ocean City's first documented business-boosters' association. Through the winter of 1922–23 it ran "an extensive publicity campaign," negotiated for increased transportation service, coordinated the hotels and boarding houses on capacity, pressed for improved approaches to the town, and cooperated with the City Council on streets and highways. It associated itself with the allied Boards of Trade of the Eastern Shore, met in the State school house, and set a further meeting for the first Monday in May 1923. Its public appeal ended: "We want the citizens of Ocean City at the meetings. We want boosters." By July 1925 its president was Dr. Charles W. Purnell, proprietor of the Atlantic Hotel, who made the formal welcome when the Board hosted the Maryland and Del-Mar-Via Press Associations for three days — more than eighty newspapermen entertained free in the town's hotels, addressed by the governors of Maryland and Delaware. The same summer the Board advertised Ocean City in the Washington Sunday Star over a table of twenty-two hotels and about 2,545 beds, inviting enquiries to 'Secretary, Board of Trade, Ocean City.' By February 1927 the president is F. W. TRUITT, not Purnell, who appears in the same attendance list as proprietor of the Atlantic Hotel. The Board still exists under that name in 1927, which bears on the 1925 pass's open question about when it became a Chamber of Commerce.