History · 1869–1940
The Railroad: the reason the town exists, and the thing it agreed to lose
Ocean City was not a resort that acquired a railroad; it was a railroad's destination that acquired a resort — the hotel of 1875 was built to give a line under construction somewhere to go. From 1899 the town's lifeline was a subsidiary owned in another state, and from 1922 it ran without paying its debts. The 1933 storm is usually said to have killed the railroad, but the road was insolvent for eleven years before it, the Pennsylvania had walked away in 1926, and when the bridge went the town agreed to the abandonment rather than fight it.
In 1869 Worcester County split over which railroad to build. The Wicomico & Pocomoke reached Berlin, won power in 1872 to extend to Sinepuxent Bay, and by 1874 a hundred men were pushing the line toward the beach — which is why a committee met on the sand in July 1873 and resolved on a hotel. The cars reached the hotel door in 1876 and rode into the town itself by 1881. The Pennsylvania Railroad bought the line in 1899, and thereafter Ocean City's service was decided elsewhere: complaints to the Public Service Commission in 1913, a threat to stop the trains in 1920, a refusal to advance funds in 1921, and no bond coupon paid after 1 March 1922. The Pennsylvania withdrew support in July 1926 blaming trucks and buses; foreclosure followed in November 1927; and at the auction of 29 March 1928 the Pennsylvania was the only bidder. The Ocean City line was expressly excepted from the abandonment and ran on. On 23 August 1933 the bay bridge went under at five in the afternoon, and the trestle was never rebuilt — not worth $90,000, and the town agreed.
The received story is that a hurricane killed the railroad. The ledger says otherwise: it had not paid a bond coupon since 1922, its parent had publicly blamed motor cars and walked away in 1926, and at its own foreclosure sale nobody but the Pennsylvania turned up to bid. The storm did not kill the line. It gave everyone a reason to stop pretending — including the town, which agreed to the abandonment seven weeks later.
22 beats · 95 dated facts · 3 open questions
The arc
1869–1874 · pivotal
A county argues about a railroad, and builds a resort by accident
Ocean City exists because Worcester County wanted a railroad and could not agree which one. In 1869 the county splits over the question while Wicomico & Pocomoke rails reach Berlin from Salisbury; the Worcester Railroad organises for Snow Hill to Berlin, runs out of money by February 1872, and is taken over by the Worcester Locomotive Company in October 1874. Meanwhile the 1872 re-charter gives the W&P power to extend its line to Sinepuxent Bay — and by 1874 about a hundred men are pushing the seaside railroad toward the beach. **The hotel is built to give the railroad somewhere to go.** The July 1873 meeting on the sand that resolved on a $25,000 hotel, and the land bought thirteen days before the Panic, are downstream of a freight argument.
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1875–1881 · pivotal
The cars reach the hotel door
The Atlantic opens in July 1875 and for its first season you get there by rail via Wilmington or by Baltimore steamer. Then in 1876 the pier across the bay is completed and **the cars run to the hotel door**; Ocean City enters the Delaware Railroad's public timetable the same year, and the first excursion train arrives on 3 August 1876 with a brass band and, because the weather looked threatening, only about forty passengers from Wilmington. In 1877 the railroads put up an Excursion House on the sand — a building whose entire purpose is to receive people the trains bring — and string the first telegraph wire. The crossing is older than the campaign had it: the Wicomico & Pocomoke's own timetable, headed 23 June 1879, already lists "Arrive Ocean City," and 1881 is the year the bay bridge was TORN UP AND REBUILT "in a very substantial manner" — a reconstruction the registry had recorded as the arrival. The resort's whole economy is now a timetable.
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1890–1899
Consolidation, and a parent in Philadelphia
The small peninsula roads are gathered up. The Baltimore & Eastern Shore reaches the beach in 1890; by the end of the decade the Baltimore, Chesapeake & Atlantic Railway holds the line, and in 1899 **the Pennsylvania Railroad buys it**. From that point Ocean City's rail service is a subsidiary decision made in another state — which is the fact that governs everything after it. The town does not own its lifeline and never will.
1892
Baltimore City buys in, and the road spends money on the ground
The year Baltimore City bought into the Baltimore & Eastern Shore is also the year the road spent money on the ground at Ocean City, and the county paper shows the spending. Contractor T. M. Slemons finished 'a large, new station house and platforms' for the B. & E. S. at Ocean City in time for the June opening; a handsome chair car was fitted out in Wilmington 'to be run on the fast express trains between Claiborne and Ocean City'; Berlin heard there would be four daily trains; Saturday-to-Monday weekend service began 16 April with trains arriving 11.30 p.m. and leaving 5.20 a.m. Monday; there was an Annual Moonlight Excursion on 9 August with a special leaving Ocean City about 10.30 p.m.; and by mid-September the road was carrying its own people down free — 'Over one thousand people took advantage of the low rates... to visit Ocean City last Sunday. Among the number were the employes of the road and their families, in all over three hundred, who were given a free excursion.' What the statute of April 1892 required — express trains from Claiborne at least three times a week in 1892 and daily thereafter — the road was visibly over-delivering by June. Set against that, the road's December dollar excursion to Baltimore ran 'from all points (except Ocean City)', which is a small but pointed exclusion, and the New York, Philadelphia & Norfolk was still defending a $30,000 suit for a man whose legs were cut off 'at the Ocean City depot'. Two additions from outside the county. Baltimore's German daily gives the trip end to end: the steamer B. S. Ford leaving Pier 8, Light Street, at 7 a.m., 44 miles to Claiborne in three hours, then two hours on the B&ES — five hours from a Baltimore pier to the surf, on a Wednesday excursion service that opened in mid-July. And the line had a cost nobody recorded: a Black boy named Briddell, struck by a locomotive's cowcatcher crossing the track between Berlin and Ocean City in mid-July, dead within hours. The campaign has two railroad maimings on this line in fourteen months — Henderson's legs at the Ocean City depot in August 1891, which produced a $30,000 suit still being defended in September 1892, and this boy, for whom nobody sued.
1893
How thin the making always was
The thread's argument is that the railroad made the town and then agreed to lose it. 1893 shows how thin the making always was. In 1892 Maryland had written summer expresses to Ocean City into statute and Baltimore City had bought a majority of the Baltimore & Eastern Shore's stock and endorsed $900,000 of its bonds. By February 1893 — three months before the Panic broke, so this cannot be blamed on the depression — the road was in a receiver's hands. Its officers were arranging $750,000 to pay off the creditors who had put it there, and a fortnight later the county paper printed the rescue terms: consolidation with the Choptank and Maryland steamboat companies under a general mortgage of $1,000,000, the Baltimore Trust and Guarantee Company as trustee, and behind it all "the bonded indebtedness of this road is about $1,400,000, the interest on which the road is in default." The same paper had reported in January that the line's net earnings would be "over $40,000 this year, an increase of 60 per cent." A road earning forty thousand a year does not service one million four hundred thousand of bonds, and the bondholders were already being told they would "submit to a scaling of their par value." And the trains ran beautifully. From 3 April the mixed trains went through to Ocean City every weekday instead of twice a week; a Baltimore round trip was two dollars on a Wednesday and three for two days; by July the Berlin correspondent counted seventeen trains a day passing his window and wrote that this "will do more to help Ocean City than anything else"; in August a special from Claiborne carried the Vice-President of the United States eighty-seven miles in a hundred minutes and beat every previous record on the line. The service was never better than in the year the company was insolvent. That is the shape of the whole thread in one season: the town's connection to the world was always a financial fiction that ran on time.
1894
A receivership dressed as a boom
The railroad's 1894 is a receivership dressed as a boom, and the town believed the dress. In March the paper announced that plans were being arranged to take the Baltimore & Eastern Shore out of the receivers' hands, that the reorganised road would 'co-operate with capitalists interested in Ocean City in the development of that summer resort,' and that Washington parties were ready to build cottages and club houses at the beach 'if a quick through schedule be arranged.' In July the promise arrived at full size: a northern syndicate, organised by the secretary of the American Sugar Refining Company, would put two mammoth hotels two miles apart north and south of the town, connect them by an electric railway along the beach, and light the whole strip between them. In September the new owners came down to look at what they had bought — the general manager of the Baltimore, Chesapeake & Atlantic arriving at Snow Hill by steamer with a Baltimore banker, a Wilmington banker and a party of New York capitalists, met by Superintendent Benjamin with a special train and run down to Ocean City and thence to Baltimore. What actually ran on the rails that year is more modest and more useful: double daily trips between Baltimore and Ocean City from 25 June, a 'cheap family Thursday excursion' promoted in the county paper every week of the summer, giving six or seven hours on the beach, and then, on 10 September, one train each way a day. The fares survive too — sixty-five cents round trip from Snow Hill, fifty from Wesley, children half — which is within a nickel of the 1892 table. The best measure of the road's real weakness is the complaint the hotel men made in August: the through connection at Salisbury was so bad that the Atlantic's management believed a single adjusted schedule would bring five hundred visitors from Richmond alone. The syndicate's electric railway was never built. The thread's argument stands: the railroad made Ocean City and then could not carry what it had made.
1895
The railroad stops serving the beach and buys it
By 1895 the railroad no longer merely serves the beach; it buys it. The Baltimore, Chesapeake & Atlantic — the consolidation of the Baltimore & Eastern Shore with the Eastern Shore steamboat lines, backed by John E. Searles and New York and Philadelphia money — completed negotiations in May to purchase the Sinepuxent Beach Company's whole five-mile property, and the reason given is precise: the land company had asked the railway to build the beach railway it had planned, and the negotiation grew out of the request. The rest of the year's railroad news is the same relationship in smaller print. A special afternoon train down from Claiborne and back in the morning, put on for the season. A summer timetable in effect 22 June with seven scheduled departures from Ocean City, an express that stopped only at Claiborne, Easton and Salisbury, and connections at Berlin for the D., M. & V. A general offer to contract with Sunday schools and societies for excursions. A dollar each way from Baltimore, a dollar for a state-room, fifty cents for a meal, and copy claiming the beach was the nearest point on the Atlantic coast to the Gulf Stream except Cape Hatteras. The Crocodile Club of Easton hitching its painted private car to a FREIGHT train so the journey to the ocean would last longer. And, in August, an eighteen-year-old asleep on the track.
1896
The campaign had this backwards
The campaign has had this backwards, and 1896 supplies the correction from inside the town. The claim was that the railroad bought the beach in May 1895. It did not. On 4 May 1896 the whole of Ocean City fought its first contested municipal election over the fact that it had not: 'It has been known for some time past that the Baltimore, Chesapeake and Atlantic Railway Company have wanted to get control of Ocean City, but were unable to complete the deal, as certain influences which had charge of the property were not in accord with the proposed sale, and it was largely for this purpose that the fight to-day was so hot.' Seven months later the Sinepuxent Beach Company was still the owner when it filed its answer admitting insolvency, and the county paper could still only report that 'the B. C. & A. Ry. Co. will buy the property.' What 1894 adds is the man: the Washington Evening Star of 30 August 1894 describes the B.C.&A. as newly constituted out of the Baltimore & Eastern Shore — eighty-two miles, Claiborne to Ocean City — plus the Maryland, Choptank and Eastern Shore steamboat companies, 'the three principal steamboat lines on the Chesapeake bay,' with John E. Searles of the sugar trust behind it. Searles is the same name attached six weeks earlier to the northern syndicate that was going to build two hotels and an electric railway on this beach. So the arc is not railroad-buys-beach; it is one financier taking the transport monopoly first, in 1894, and then spending three years failing to buy the land it served — while the resident south end organised a ticket against him and the beach's owner went broke underneath him. Whoever eventually took the property took it out of a receivership, not a negotiation.
1897
1897
The year the Pennsylvania Railroad looked seriously at a second line and Ocean City started advertising the answer before it existed. In July a Baltimore dispatch reported that the company 'has under consideration the building of an extension to Ocean City, Md. Two routes are being considered — one from Showells and the other from Friendship' — and that its engineers had already walked both and reported either buildable 'at comparatively small cost'. By November Waggaman's auction advertising was promising that 'Ocean City will be reached next season in about 3 1/2 hours', against the 4 1/2 hours his own summer advertisements had claimed. It was not. The same survey resurfaces as the Bishopville branch in 1899, with the right of way secured and completion promised 'before next summer', and that was not built either. Two engineering surveys and two published completion dates across three years, and Ocean City kept one rail approach until the storm took it in 1933. The advertisement is the tell: the town's real product was the journey, and its owner was selling a journey the railroad had not agreed to provide.
1898
1898
Nothing new beyond the Berlin-branch visit already recorded, and the shape of the sequence is now clear enough to state: the Pennsylvania surveyed a second line into Ocean City in 1897 from Showells or Friendship, sent an officer down by special Pullman in 1898, and had the Bishopville right of way secured with completion promised 'before next summer' in 1899. Three years of survey, one railroad, no second line.
1899
The last summer as an independent company
The Baltimore, Chesapeake & Atlantic spent its last summer as an independent company doing the two things that turned Ocean City from a week's holiday into a day out. Its summer schedule, in force from 29 June 1899, added "both local and through Sunday Trains" — out of Pier 4, Light Street at half past seven in the morning and back into Baltimore at half past ten at night — and it gave one of the new trains a name: the "Ocean City Flyer." In January of the same year the same paper had printed the company's own terms for being bought, that its officials "declare that it will never be a party to the project unless all its property is bought out." In September the Pennsylvania bought all of it — ninety miles of railroad, eleven steamers, a hundred wharves. The Flyer ran that summer for a company that no longer existed by the time its timetable expired.
1900
1900
The Pennsylvania Railroad's first full year as owner of the Baltimore, Chesapeake & Atlantic produced no second line, no new terminus in the session laws and no charter of its own. What the 1900 legislature did charter was a competitor of a sort: the Ocean City Steel Pier Railway and Amusement Company, empowered to run an electric or compressed-air railway the whole length of the barrier island from Fenwick's Island Lighthouse to the North Beach life-saving station, with John F. Waggaman among its incorporators and the Mayor and City Council given a veto over anything touching the town's streets. Nine incorporators, a thousand shares at fifty dollars, and power to consolidate with or lease to connecting railways. None of it was built.
1913–1922
The road stops paying, and starts arguing with the town it built
The relationship sours early and in public. In 1913 the Atlantic Hotel's manager complains to the Public Service Commission that the B.C.&A. "dumps" its excursionists on hotel property; in 1920 the road threatens to stop the Ocean City trains outright. Then the money goes. In 1921 the Pennsylvania **refuses to advance funds** and buys the coupons off the bondholders instead — while the road simultaneously cuts Baltimore–Ocean City fares to fight the bay ferries. From 1 March 1922 it pays no coupon on its $1,250,000 five per cent gold bonds at all. The line runs for another eleven years without paying its debts.
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1926–1929 · pivotal
Withdrawal, foreclosure, and one bidder
In July 1926 the Pennsylvania tells the B.C.&A. it will buy no more of its coupon bonds, citing "the continued unsatisfactory financial condition and outlook of the railway company, and its inability to increase or to improve its earnings" — and the cause it names is trucks, buses and private motor cars. In November 1927 the Chatham-Phenix National Bank files to foreclose: no coupon paid since 1 March 1922, $375,000 of back interest, and the Pennsylvania offering $501.04 per $1,000 bond on more than $2,500,000 sunk. The auction comes on 29 March 1928 at Pier 6, Light Street Wharf, under a decree of Judge Coleman, with total indebtedness of $1,710,410.65 — and **the Pennsylvania is the only bidder**, taking it for $1,000,000. In November the ICC authorises the Baltimore & Eastern to acquire the 88-mile line. **But the Ocean City rail line and the Love Point ferry are expressly excepted from the abandonment.** The resort's trains outlive the corporation that ran them.
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1931–1933 · pivotal
Still running, and then the bridge goes at five o'clock
The line is alive to the end. In 1931 a non-stop train still reaches Ocean City from Claiborne; passenger service runs Easton to Ocean City right up to 23 August 1933. That afternoon, at five o'clock, the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge across Sinepuxent Bay "disappeared beneath giant waves," marooning several freight cars at the resort. **The trestle was never rebuilt — because it was not judged worth $90,000, and the town itself agreed to the abandonment application of 11 October.** Freight continued from a temporary station on the mainland. Sixty-four years after Worcester County argued about which railroad to build, the storm that made the inlet unmade the reason the town existed — and the town consented.
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1934
The railroad is lifted and relaid as the jetty
The thread ends with the town agreeing to lose the thing that made it. 1934 is the first year of the loss in practice, and it is legible in two municipal documents. On 17 July the council grants a permit for a Tri-State Oil Company filling station 'on R R lots' — eleven months after the railway applied to abandon passenger service, its ground in the middle of town is licensed for petrol; the same motion grants a garage at 1st Street and Philadelphia Avenue and, in the same breath, a blacksmith's shop. And through June the Berlin-Ocean City Lions Club and 'certain Ocean City organisations' fight over which Chesapeake ferry the Baltimore bus should cross on, winning an hour off the journey — five hours instead of six, via Matapeake instead of Claiborne, one express trip a day — and losing the northern leg they had asked for. A resort that had ridden a train since 1876 spent its first railless summer arguing about a bus timetable and licensing a petrol pump on the depot lots. The replacement was not a worse railway. It was a road.
1935
Present only as material
**Two years after the last train, the railroad is present in 1935 only as material and as a landmark for measuring floods.** In April the town's secretary was instructed to write the officials of the Pennsylvania Railroad **thanking them for the cinders they had given the city** — the company that abandoned the line is now supplying the ballast the relief men shovel onto Ocean City's streets, and in the same breath the council wrote to the Public Service Commission asking that the Maryland-Delaware Stages be allowed to run a bus line into town. The rails themselves had already gone into the south jetty in 1934. What was left of the crossing gets its last recorded appearance on **18 November 1935**, when a north-easter put the sea over everything and the newspaper reported that the jetties were 'far under water and invisible, **as was the abandoned railroad bridge**.' The line survives in 1935 as three things and no more: a source of cinders, a stone jetty, and a submerged reference mark in a storm report. Even the new federal fishing harbour is surveyed against it — the channel approved in August runs '3,000 feet into the marsh **south of the railroad** at Ocean City.'
1936
A coda
The railroad's ending has a coda, and 1936 supplies it. The Baltimore & Eastern, having abandoned the beach in 1933 and watched its ties and rails go into the jetty trestle in 1934, relaid track in West Ocean City in June 1936 - to the edge of the bay, following the new federal fishing harbour. It came back for fish, not for passengers. In the same year the Pennsylvania Railroad sold its Ocean City waterfront, facing the harbour from the east side of the bay, to the United States Coast Guard, which dredged a six-foot basin there, drove 580 feet of steel bulkhead under contract to the Tidewater Construction Company of Norfolk, and planned two marine railways and a boathouse to replace the station then standing on the boardwalk. The land the town was built to reach passed to the service that had been on this beach before the town existed. And the traffic the railroad had carried was counted that summer by the state police at the harbour bridge: over 7,000 automobiles on 4 July between eight and five, and 3,000 more that evening.
1937
A survey landmark and a seller of scrap
**By 1937 the railroad at Ocean City is a survey landmark and a seller of land.** The trestle the 1933 storm cut has not been rebuilt and is not going to be; what remains of the Pennsylvania Railroad's presence in the town is a strip of ground on the bay front, which the Coast Guard bought and which the Lukens Dredging Company of Baltimore diked, filled and dredged into a nine-and-a-half-foot boat basin in thirty days in July 1937, at the foot of a proposed $92,000 station. The old railroad bridge site is cited in the newspapers of 1937 purely as a bearing — 'between the old railroad bridge site and the present bulkhead' — the way a demolished landmark survives in the language of surveyors after it has stopped existing. When the council debated where a trailer park might go in June, the site it was willing to consider was 'the R R Lot south of Worcester street'. **There is no 1937 rail-service news for Ocean City in either county paper.** The men are going too: L. Franklin 'Shorty' Bowen, who had run trains for the Baltimore, Chesapeake & Atlantic for forty years - starting in 1889, the year before the rails reached the island, retired in 1929, four years before the storm cut the trestle - died in the spring of 1937. And the road that replaced the railroad was already coming from the other direction: Delaware had built its ocean highway south from Rehoboth as far as Bethany Beach and expected to extend it four miles to the Maryland line, leaving Maryland's piece as the only gap between Rehoboth and Ocean City. What replaced the railroad is visible in the same year's traffic: Red Star Lines running seven extra buses from Baltimore for the Fourth of July, and 2,000 cars that could not get into the town at all.
1938
The bridge that replaces the railroad's world
**The bridge that replaces the railroad's world gets built in 1938, and Ocean City signs the papers against its own vote.** In September 1937 the town had voted 275 to 97 for Worcester Street in a referendum Congress itself had written into the bridge authorisation; in December the state said the vote was not binding. On the morning of Monday 6 June 1938, at a special meeting called for the purpose, the Mayor and City Council enacted an ordinance approving the State Roads Commission's plans for a bridge over Sinepuxent Bay landing 'in the Beds of North Division Street and Caroline Street', under Contract No. WO-180, and granted the State of Maryland the public easement in both streets from Philadelphia Avenue to the bay - reserving only its traffic, parking and police powers. **The town enacted its own defeat, unanimously, before nine-thirty in the morning.** The Commission accepted on 27 July and sent a certified copy of its resolution back to be copied into the minute book. But the fight did not stop: a residents' Ocean City Bridge Committee - L. Franklin Purnell, Dr. Charles W. Purnell, Clarence Carey, Edward Gray, William H. Purnell secretary - asked the state instead to survey North Fifteenth Street, where 'rights of way can be secured at low cost', and to spend the saving rebuilding the Worcester Street span. **Then on 15 August about three hundred people filled the Ocean City Pier convention hall for a War Department hearing, and the count was ten documents and twelve speakers against, four documents and two speakers for.** The objectors were the water trades: boat captains of St. Martin's River and Isle of Wight Bay, Ocean City captains with a petition, Trimper's Marine Railway, The Farms Company, Glen Riddle Farms, Peninsula Packing, the Beach Gunning Club, the Nordica Hotel, W. Preston Laws and Capt. Thomas T. Moore. And Capt. H. T. Miller, the District engineer, made the ruling that decided it: the State Roads Commission 'must definitely decide whether or not it intends to maintain the present Worcester street bridge at Ocean City, before any permit will be issued'. **The argument had stopped being about where the town wanted its bridge and had become about what would happen to the bridge it already had.** In November L. Franklin Purnell asked the council to seek another federal hearing; in December the plans were laid out for a room full of West Ocean City people, and the council took no action and sent them back to the engineers' office.
1939
The railroad that made the town is a seller
**In 1939 the railroad that made Ocean City is a seller.** On 21 June the Mayor and City Council went through the year's new assessments raising almost everybody, and then turned to 'Reductions were made in following Property' and wrote down the Baltimore & Eastern's Ocean City lots by $2,400. On 27 October the *Worcester Democrat and the Ledger-Enterprise* recorded, in a column of ordinary real-estate transfers between a home for the aged and seven acres near Trappe: 'United States of America from Balto. Eastern R. Road Co., real estate containing .92 acre, more or less, in Ocean City. Consideration $7,500.' **Nine-tenths of an acre of Ocean City, from the railroad to the federal government, in the autumn of 1939.** The campaign does not know where it was or what it was for, and both answers matter, because the plausible buyers are the Coast Guard and the Corps of Engineers and either one is the shape of the next six years. **Meanwhile the thing that replaces the railroad is being poured in reinforced concrete.** The State Roads Commission describes the new Sinepuxent Bay bridge landing 'at North Division Street in Ocean City' - 2,300 feet long, a bascule span in the channel, a 46-foot roadway for four lanes and five-foot sidewalks, replacing 'an antiquated structure that was built in 1918' and due for completion in the autumn of 1941. Four numbered reasons are given for the site and not one of them is what the town voted for in September 1937.
1940
A story about what replaced it
The railroad thread has long since become a story about what replaced it, and 1940 is the year the replacement arrives without a ceremony. The Coastal Highway from Ocean City to the Delaware line was complete in the fiscal year ending June 1940 and was under state maintenance by 20 February, and the State Roads Commission's own report - the volume that announces it - contains no word beginning 'dedicat' anywhere in it. Two governors had been booked for 1 September 1939 and the programme was cancelled because eight miles of Maryland were unfinished; it was never rescheduled. So the most consequential road ever built to this town opened in a sentence of the passive voice under a photograph captioned 'SAND ASPHALT CONSTRUCTION ALONG COASTAL HIGHWAY FROM OCEAN CITY, NORTH'. And at the other end of town the bridge that would replace the railroad's own crossing was still being fought over: on 15 January 1940 Ocean City repealed the ordinance by which it had given the State the beds of North Division and Caroline Streets, and on 12 March had to ask its own attorney whether the repeal was valid or whether the previous council's grant still held - and what rights the State Roads Commission had in closing St. Louis Avenue, if any. A town that had voted four to one for Worcester Street in 1937 and been overruled was still trying to take its streets back three years later, and was no longer sure it could.
What we still cannot show
Recorded by the research itself, with where the answer would come from.
- 1890–1899 The 1890s consolidation is the thinnest stretch of this thread. How the Baltimore & Eastern Shore, the Wicomico & Pocomoke and their neighbours became the B.C.&A., and on what terms the Pennsylvania bought in 1899, rests on very few facts. The Hagley/PRRT&HS chronologies were chased across three passes for exactly this and the files for 1924–28 return 404; the 1923 file exists at the no-suffix URL.Where to look: human-archive-visit — Hagley Museum PRR records; ICC finance dockets; PRR annual reports
- 1927–1928 The 1928 ICC order and the 1927 foreclosure are known only through newspapers. The docket itself would give the line's condition, its traffic, and what the Pennsylvania thought it was buying for $1,000,000 — and would settle whether the Ocean City line's exception was a concession to the town or simply the only profitable segment.Where to look: human-archive-visit — ICC finance dockets, NARA; U.S. District Court for Maryland, Judge Coleman's decree
- 1933 Why the town AGREED to the abandonment in October 1933 is unexplained. A resort whose existence began with a railroad consented to losing it within seven weeks of the bridge going down. No municipal record of that decision has been seen, and the county paper for 1933 does not carry the debate.Where to look: maryland-state-archives — Ocean City council minutes, autumn 1933; ICC abandonment docket
Threads that cross this one
The Inlet: sixty-four years of asking, and one night of weatherThe Boardwalk: no founding date, because it was never foundedBlack Ocean City: present from the second season, recorded almost entirely by other peopleFire: a wooden town that kept burning, and a fire company that kept paradingWater, light and sewer: a town that kept acquiring utilities it could not keepThe Hotels: the town's cause, its whole economy, and its standing riskThe Life-Saving Service: older than the town, and the only institution here whose business was other people's lives