History · 1882–2025
Water, light and sewer: a town that kept acquiring utilities it could not keep
Ocean City's hotels and a federal lifesaving service had electric light, telephones and artesian water a generation before the municipality did; the town's own ventures into utility ownership were short and unlucky — a generator bought in 1909 and franchised away by 1913, a water works that nearly burned the south end down, a power plant destroyed in 1925 and never rebuilt — so that by 1926 it bought its electricity from Delaware and its water from a private ice company, having spent five years refusing a State Board of Health order until the Governor sued it.
Every utility the town eventually owned, somebody private had first: the Atlantic Hotel was "lighted by electricity" in 1893 and the Life-Saving Service had a telephone line in 1887, while the municipality owned no generator until 1909 and gave the franchise away in 1913. A municipal water system arrived in 1902 with a 110-foot stand pipe, and in 1909 an exploding oil lamp at the town water works nearly destroyed the south end of Ocean City. Sewerage was worse: ordered by the State Board of Health in 1917, still refused in 1921 when the Governor had personally sued the town, and absent from the 1922 session laws entirely while neighbouring towns got their bonds. By 1923 the town bought 20,000 gallons a day from the Ocean City Ice Company; after the 1925 fire destroyed its power plant — valued in the loss schedule at exactly what the Atlantic Hotel was worth — it never generated again, taking current from Laurel, Delaware instead. The one success is the last beat: by 1930 doctors were prescribing the town's tap water. — EXTENDED TO 2025 (task 3.3): the 1957 annexation was made on a promise of water in four years and sewer in eight, and by 1964 sewerage or water was discussed at all forty-seven council meetings, 617 times. The town refused to join the Sanitary Commission because building the sewer first would destroy any reason for the north to be annexed. The winter of 1977 froze the Chesapeake and broke the system; 1979 refused West Ocean City's sewage and named an ocean outfall over Assateague as the alternative; 2010 rebuilt the plants on borrowed money. The thread ends in 2018 with the town naming its Downtown First-to-Flood Areas and planning for two feet of sea level rise - having begun in 1882 with the problem of getting water in.
The 1909 water-works fire is the thread in miniature: the utility the town had just bought to serve itself nearly burned the town down. And the 1925 loss schedule makes the point in figures — the power plant and the Atlantic Hotel were each worth $100,000, and only one of them was rebuilt. Ocean City would replace a hotel before it would replace a generator, which tells you exactly what kind of town it had decided to be.
33 beats · 134 dated facts · 3 open questions
The arc
1882–1895 · pivotal
The hotels get there first, by a generation
Every utility Ocean City eventually owned, a private company or a hotel had first. In 1882 the town drills for fresh water and the wells that matter are the Atlantic Hotel's, seventy-four feet down. The first artesian well, in 1892, is contracted not by the town but by the SINEPUXENT BEACH COMPANY. And the rebuilt Atlantic advertises ELECTRIC LIGHT AND AN ELEVATOR in 1892, calling itself "lighted by electricity" the following year — seventeen years before the municipality owns a generator. The Life-Saving Service, meanwhile, has a telephone line from Lewes to Assateague by 1887. A federal agency and a hotel company wired this beach long before its government did.
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1893
Two utilities acquired, both arriving as debt
The thread's argument is that Ocean City kept acquiring utilities it could not keep. 1893 hands it the moment of acquisition for two of them, and both arrive as gossip rather than as engineering. The artesian well the Sinepuxent Beach Company contracted for in May 1892 had been an open question — the 1892 pass could show a contract with John K. Shannahan of Easton and nothing else. Then, on 4 February 1893, in the middle of a freeze that had the life-saving crews driving wagons over Sinepuxent Bay, the Berlin correspondent noted: "Only one air-hole in Sinepuxent bay and that at Ocean City— Some attribute this to the artesian well, others say hell is a little nearer there than elsewhere." Something under the town was discharging enough water to hold a hole open in ice thick enough to carry corn. The first engineered fresh water beneath Ocean City existed, and the evidence for it is a joke about the devil. The light arrives the same way. Benjamin Hearthway, who ran the Snow Hill Electric Light Company's works, spent the whole season from 1 June at Ocean City "running the Electric Light Plant" there and came home in the first week of September; the Atlantic Hotel advertised itself in the Washington papers as "lighted by electricity." Whose plant it was — the town's, the hotel's or the Beach Company's — 1893 still does not say, and the town had no waterworks, no sewer and no fire engine of any kind. When Snow Hill burned in August the lesson other towns drew was to build waterworks; Ocean City, four miles of frame hotels on a sandbar, drew nothing at all.
1894
A charter clause and a more useful negative
1894 gives the thread a charter clause and a negative, and the negative is the more useful. Chapter 128 of the Acts of 1894 handed the new Mayor and City Council of Ocean City the ordinary municipal-works powers — to work and mend the public streets, to open, close, alter and widen them with a three-examiner condemnation procedure and a right of appeal, to provide for board walks upon the sidewalks, and to vest the franchises and easements of the public streets 'completely in them, with power to grant the same whenever to them the interest of the public shall demand.' That franchise-granting clause is the legal instrument every later light, water and telephone company at Ocean City would have to come through, and it is dated 27 March 1894. What the town did with it that year, on the evidence of every surviving page of its county paper, is lay plank walks. There is no mention in 1894 of the electric light plant that ran the whole 1893 season under a borrowed engineer from Snow Hill, none of the artesian well the Sinepuxent Beach Company contracted for in 1892, and none of a public water supply — while in the same twelve months the paper reports Snow Hill's own council retaining a Philadelphia engineer for waterworks and the legislature authorising Snow Hill to put water bonds to a ballot. The county seat was engineering its water in 1894 and the resort was not. Whether Ocean City's 1893 light plant was still running is a question this year cannot answer, and the silence should be recorded as measured: 206 pages, no mention.
1895
An electric light nobody voted on
Ocean City's electric light in 1895 is not a municipal utility and was never voted on; it is a land company's fixture, bought to sell lots. The Sinepuxent Beach Company's March programme lists 'additional dynamos for supplying electricity to light the town' in the same sentence as a steam laundry and an ice-making machine — plant items on a developer's improvement schedule, alongside a railway. The word 'additional' is the tell: there were already dynamos, and the town's lighting had been the company's business before 1895. What the year gives as evidence of use is a private one: a man on top of the Atlantic Hotel's elevator in July, repairing the wire that fed the electric light inside, who lost his footing when the car went up. A town whose light came with its landlord had no franchise to grant, no bond to float and no ordinance to pass — which is exactly why the campaign has found no municipal record of it, and why the light would become a municipal problem only once the landlord changed hands.
1896
Private amenities before municipal ambitions
Ocean City's utilities begin as private amenities and only become municipal ambitions after the private owner fails. The Atlantic Hotel was advertising 'artesian well; sanitary sewerage' to Washington readers in the season of 1894 — the hotel belonging to the Sinepuxent Beach Company, which by May 1896 also had an electric-light plant on the beach with a brick smokestack tall enough for a seventy-mile gale to knock down. Only in June 1896 does the county paper describe artesian water as the town's condition rather than a house's selling point: 'The introduction of artesian well water has removed the one great objection to the place. Pure water now is drawn from a depth of three hundred feet.' And only in September, four months after a new council took office, does the town make a claim of its own: 'The City Council has plans in process for a water supply and sewerage system which will likely be put in operation by next season,' announced in the same paragraph as the town's first Board of Health, with Dr. C. S. Ames of Baltimore and Dr. Paul Jones of Snow Hill appointed health commissioners. Three months after that, the same water supply and sewerage appear in a very different list — the things a purchaser of the bankrupt Beach Company's property would be expected to carry on. So it is genuinely unclear in 1896 whose scheme it was, and that ambiguity is the finding: at the moment Ocean City first proposed to supply its own water, the company that had actually built every utility on the beach was in receivership, and the town's plan and the receiver's asset list describe the same pipes.
1897
The light plant and the well change hands with the beach
Electric light at Ocean City is older and more widely distributed in 1897 than this thread has been able to show, and the evidence arrives in an inventory and a storm report rather than in an ordinance. The inventory: what Waggaman bought in May included 'the ladies' bath houses, electric light plant, artesian well' — the town's generating station and its water source were private property, and they passed with the hotel. The storm report: on the night of 25 October 'the electric light poles and wires from the Atlantic Hotel southward are all torn away and washed out by the heavy seas.' Poles and wires running south from the Atlantic is a street distribution network, not a hotel installation, and it is the earliest evidence of one this campaign holds. Congress Hall was advertising 'electric lights, electric bells and every modern convenience' the same season after a $10,000 remodelling. So when the new charter of 1898 authorised $30,000 of bonds for water works and a sewerage system, and when the council voted unanimously to bond the town for water works in 1900, they were not building the first utility here. They were trying to municipalise something a private owner already had.
1898–1902
The town borrows, and builds a stand pipe
The 1898 charter lets Ocean City borrow $30,000 in six-per-cent bonds for water and sewer; in 1900 the council votes unanimously to bond the town for water works; and in 1902 a municipal water system is completed — a 110-foot stand pipe and a pumping station. Twenty years after the hotels sank their own wells, the town has a public supply. Note who won the argument: the 1902 system arrives six weeks before the largest of the summer proprietors becomes mayor.
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1900
1900
The council's unanimous vote to bond the town for water works reads differently once 1897 is in the record. The electric light plant and the artesian well were private property sold with the Atlantic Hotel in 1897; poles and wires already ran south along the ocean front; the 1898 charter had authorised $30,000 for water and sewerage and nothing came of it. The 1900 vote is the third municipal attempt in three years to buy or build what one man already owned, and the campaign still has no evidence that any of the three produced a public utility.
1909–1913 · pivotal
A twenty-horsepower engine, a fire at the works, and then the franchise is given away
In 1909 the town finally buys its own electricity: a twenty-horsepower gasoline engine, a municipal light and water plant. The same year an exploding oil lamp AT THE TOWN WATER WORKS nearly takes the south end of Ocean City — the utility very nearly destroying the town it served. In 1910 Chapter 247 makes water rents a tax lien on the property, which is how a small town makes an unprofitable service pay. In 1912 the sewerage system is built, dug by the Black labourers the town's own payroll names. And in 1913, four years after buying its generator, Ocean City GRANTS ITS ELECTRIC LIGHT FRANCHISE AWAY to the Delmarvia Company. The municipal experiment in generation lasts four years.
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1917–1922 · pivotal
Five years of refusing the State Board of Health, until the Governor sues
The sewerage story is the sharpest thing in this thread. The State Board of Health orders Ocean City to build a new system in 1917. The town does not. It is still refusing in April 1921, when Mayor E. E. Collins leads a delegation to Baltimore to argue about it with Governor Ritchie in the room — and RITCHIE HAD PERSONALLY SUED THE TOWN. Then the 1922 General Assembly, the session that could have ended a five-year standoff, passes NO sewerage act for Ocean City at all, while Princess Anne and Mt. Rainier get their water-and-sewer bonds. The town's entire 1922 legislative output is one street act and a resolution about dynamite. Meanwhile in 1920 the telephone company had gone before the Public Service Commission asking to DROP Ocean City altogether.
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1923–1924
Water bought from the ice company
By 1923 the town is contracting with the OCEAN CITY ICE COMPANY for twenty thousand gallons a day from a 260-foot well, and laying foundations for a new oil engine at the electric light plant. A municipality that had bonded itself for water works in 1900 is buying its supply from a private ice plant twenty-three years later. In 1924 it borrows another $10,000 for streets and water.
1925–1927 · pivotal
The plant burns, and the town leaves the business for good
The Great Fire of 29 December 1925 starts in the small room adjoining the engine room of the electric and water plant, and the itemised loss puts the PLANT AT $100,000 — exactly equal to the Atlantic Hotel. Ocean City does not rebuild it. It is wired instead to a transmission line from LAUREL, DELAWARE, by a New York holding company, and the advertising that follows sells forty electric ranges and an electric bakery. So the fire's most permanent effect was not on the boardwalk but on the balance sheet: it ended municipal generation for good, and the town has bought its power out of another state ever since. In 1927 it borrows $35,000 for streets, water and sewer, passed as an EMERGENCY law.
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1929–1930
And the water, at least, turned out to be good
The thread ends with an unexpected vindication. In 1929 the town issues $25,000 of improvement bonds at five per cent. And by 1930 DOCTORS ARE PRESCRIBING OCEAN CITY'S TAP WATER — chemists having analysed it and found it worth sending patients to. After fifty years of borrowing for water works, burning down the plant, buying supply from an ice company and power from Delaware, the one thing the town had actually got right was the water itself.
1934
A bond resolution that becomes a statute
The thread's argument — that Ocean City kept acquiring utilities it could not keep — turns over in 1934 into its inverse: the town tries to acquire one on purpose, and the trigger is a single invoice. On 9 October the council orders paid $608.18 to the Eastern Shore Public Service Company 'for September' — one month of light, in a resort whose whole police force cost $18 a week a man and whose garbage was hauled for $4.50 a day. Two weeks later, on 23 October, it resolves to have its solicitor prepare a bill for the General Assembly 'asking Bond issue with Referendum for $100,000 to build electric plant'; in November it writes to its new auditor for the name of 'an expert on Costs and operation of Electric plants'. Maryland held no session in 1934, so the bill had to wait — and when the legislature acted, in Chapter 471 of the Acts of 1935, approved by Governor Nice on 17 May, it authorised not $100,000 but up to $150,000, and made it conditional on a vote of the town. So the pattern here is not another utility slipping away. It is a town that had lost its railway and gained a harbour deciding it would rather owe bondholders than a power company — and a legislature that raised the stake by half before handing the decision back to the voters. Whether Ocean City ever built the plant is the next agent's question.
1935
Went to Annapolis for electricity, came home with a sewer
**1935 is the year the thread's thesis is tested and, for once, comes out the other way — but not with the utility the town asked for.** Ocean City went to Annapolis for electricity. The council had resolved on 23 October 1934 to seek a $100,000 bond issue to build its own plant; the General Assembly gave it more than it asked, **Chapter 471 of the Acts of 1935 authorising up to $150,000** subject to a referendum. And then the town did nothing with it. The minutes show the council still working the question through the spring — a contractor's letter on the cost of *estimating* a plant read and laid on the table on 8 January, and on 23 April an instruction to invite **Gibbs & Hill, consulting engineers of New York**, to a meeting on 30 April. There was no meeting on 30 April. After that the electric plant disappears from the record: **not one of the year's twenty-six meetings mentions it again, no referendum was held, no bond was issued, and in December the town was still paying a private company for its light — $370.80 for November alone.** What it built instead was a sewer, and it built it fast and on someone else's money. On **2 September** the council met in special session to authorise an application to the United States. On **9 October** the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works offered, under State File No. Md. 1065 and over Assistant Administrator Horatio B. Hackett's signature, **a grant of 45% of the cost of interceptor sewers, pumping units, discharge line and disposal plant, capped at $49,909, and to buy $61,000 of the town's bonds at par.** The council accepted it on **16 October**, called a referendum on **18 October**, and on **1 November** the town voted **104 to 1 for sewerage bonds** at the Fire House. The next afternoon it issued sixty-one bonds at four per cent maturing to 1955, pledging an unlimited ad valorem tax, and sold every one of them at private sale to the United States government. On **27 December** it opened three contractors' bids and awarded the work to A. Stanley Mundy & Co. of Woodbridge, New Jersey. So the town that could not keep a utility it bought could get one it was given: **the difference in 1935 is not competence, it is Washington.** A town rolling ninety-day thousand-dollar notes all summer signed a forty-year bond schedule in November because the federal government was the buyer. **And the size of what was thrown away is now on the record from outside the minute book.** The Washington Times of 26 February 1935 reported Senate Bill No. 138 authorising Ocean City *“to install and operate a municipally-owned power plant and to borrow up to $150,000 to pay for it”* — in the same column as a bill letting Berlin, Md., borrow $100,000 for sewers. Berlin borrowed for a sewer and got one. **Ocean City was handed half again what it asked for, for a power plant, and built a sewer with somebody else's money instead.** The thread's thesis survives with a sharper edge: the town's problem was never the authority to own a utility. It was the capital to build one — and the only capital available in 1935 came from Washington, which was not offering it for electricity. **And the Act itself has now been read, which turns a puzzle into a decision.** Chapter 471, at pages 984-988 of the session volume, approved 17 May 1935, is not a vague permission. It names the bonds — “Ocean City Electric Plant Bonds” — exempts them from all State, County and Municipal taxes, caps the interest at five per cent, gives the town condemnation powers inside and outside its limits, and obliges the council, if the plant's profits fail, to “levy and collect upon the assessable property of the town ... such additional sum as shall be necessary.” It sets out the referendum in full, down to the two squares on the ballot reading **“For Electric Lighting Plant”** and **“Against Electric Lighting Plant.”** And it leaves out exactly one thing: **a date.** The election was to be held “on a date to be selected by the said Mayor and City Council of Ocean City,” and the Act became operative for that purpose on 1 June 1935. **The town was not refused a power plant and did not lose a vote on one. It simply never called the vote.** Six months later it called a different one, in eleven days flat, and won it 104 to 1. ⚠ **And the electorate matters.** Chapter 45 of the same session, approved 29 April, re-enacted the town's franchise: a voter had for a year to have been “assessed on the tax books of said town with, and ... the owner of, real or personal property of the value of at least one hundred dollars,” and councilmen had themselves to be owners of real estate. **The 104 who voted to pledge an unlimited ad valorem levy were the people who would pay it.** That is not a town persuaded; it is a tax base agreeing to bond itself for a service — which is precisely why it could be done for a sewer, whose benefit is a property benefit, and was never attempted for a power plant, whose benefit would have gone to everybody.
1936
Seventy per cent complete
The thread's thesis is that Ocean City kept acquiring utilities it could not keep. 1936 tests it twice and it survives both times, for opposite reasons. The sewer, voted 104 to 1 on a property-owner franchise in November 1935, was contracted on 15 January 1936 under P.W.A. Docket No. Md. 1065-R, started on 28 March, halted in July for want of money, restarted in August when Roosevelt raised the grant from $49,909 to $56,659, and reached the last council meeting of the year seventy per cent complete with the attorney instructed to prepare papers to draw the balance. The town could build a sewer only because the federal government paid half of it and bought its bonds, and it still ran out of money halfway. The electric plant went the other way and proves the same point: Chapter 471 of 1935 gave Ocean City $150,000 of borrowing power and a word-for-word ballot, and the town never called the referendum. On 9 June 1936 it signed a five-year street-lighting contract and a one-year power contract with the Eastern Shore Public Service Company instead - six cents a kilowatt-hour on the first thousand watts, two on the next, 1.8 above two thousand, a $375 annual saving on a change to 100 candle-power lamps, and the Fire House lit free. A town that could not finish a sewer with federal money was never going to run a power station. The authority to build one, held and not used, was worth more as a bargaining position than it would have been as a plant. THE STATE'S OWN NUMBERS, NEWLY QUOTABLE, CLOSE THE YEAR: 'Ocean City installed 7,750 feet of sewers and a portion of its treatment plant at a cost of $35,431. The system when completed will cost approximately $125,000.' That is Abel Wolman's Bureau of Sanitary Engineering in the Maryland State Board of Health's report for 1936 - a volume that, unlike the rights-restricted 1935 report, is Full View and quotable. And in the same report, the thread's most surprising counterfactual: a viscose manufacturer asked the Bureau to compare four Maryland sites for a rayon plant, and 'the site near Ocean City appeared to be most favorable'. The town whose sewage the state was helping to pipe into the inlet was simultaneously the state's preferred place to dilute the wastes of a rayon works.
1937
The plant is accepted, eight months late
**On 8 June 1937 Ocean City accepted a sewage treatment plant, and the story that began with a 104-to-1 referendum in 1935 ended — into the inlet.** The intercepting sewers went first, accepted from A. Stanley Mundy & Co. on 30 April; the plant from M. J. McDermott of Georgetown, Delaware on 8 June; and the works had actually been running since the week of 15 April. What was built is worth stating plainly because it is the moment a resort of a few hundred permanent residents acquired a piece of twentieth-century municipal machinery: 7,750 lineal feet of cast-iron intercepting sewer, 12 to 20 inches, laid below mean high water of Sinepuxent Bay; a plant on St. Louis Avenue between North First and North Second Streets capable of three million gallons a day; electric, virtually automatic, with gasoline stand-by units; and under-water sewage grinders the engineer said were the first installed in Maryland. The effluent was chlorinated and discharged by force main to the Ocean City inlet — the channel the 1933 hurricane had opened, which had been the fishing fleet's harbour mouth for four years and was now also the town's outfall. **It ran eight months late, and the reasons are the Depression in one sentence: the contractor could not get cinders and brick, and the State Board of Health made him have a Philadelphia filter company invent a way of stopping sewage backing into the drinking water.** The council waived his liquidated damages. It cost somewhere between $120,000 and $125,909 — its own newspaper printed three different totals in eight months — and the town's share was $61,000 of 1935 bonds, eight more $1,000 bonds at 4 per cent issued in February 1937, and a $56,659 federal grant. **And it was not finished.** In November the council authorised the diversion of ten sewers still emptying into the bay, and on 14 December gave the west-side Philadelphia Avenue connection to George & Lynch at $6,921.15, undercutting both firms that had built the PWA works. Eight months after the plant went into service, ten of the town's own outfalls were still going raw into Sinepuxent Bay.
1938
The other half of owning a sewer
**1938 is the year Ocean City discovers the other half of owning a sewer, which is the power to make people join it.** The plant had been accepted in 1937 after eight months' delay. In 1938 the state came for the shanties. On 4 April Dr. Wallace Spring of the Board of Health told the council to pass an ordinance 'Compelling all dwelling places Especially shanties to Connect to sewer and have flush toilets with water under pressure', described the unsanitary conditions along the bay shore, and suggested a place be provided in West Ocean City for shanties and trailers with proper sanitary facilities. On 12 April he came back about eliminating outdoor toilets and took a draft away for his engineers. On 10 May: 'Ordinance #100 was unanimously passed forbidding use of Cesspools and Privys in corporate limits of Ocean City and Secretary instructed to notify owners of land where shanties were that they must connect to sewer.' The county paper had already told its readers what was coming - an ordinance 'which, when passed, will compel every property owner in the corporate limits of Ocean City to connect their properties with the new Ocean City sewer system', within thirty days. **And Maryland noticed. The State Board of Health's report for 1938 lists the eight summer resorts it inspected regularly - Ocean City, Tolchester, North Beach, Chesapeake Beach, Pen Mar, Betterton, Public Landing, Hygeia - and says: 'With the exception of Ocean City, no major improvements were made.'** The engineering closed out in the same year: Clark Gardner's final measurement of the West Side sewers, $7,134.05, paid in March; $3,000 to George & Lynch on account in February; and a $45 pump bought 'to use in repairing leaks', which is the first maintenance in the record. **Then, in December, the money stopped.** 'Letter from Government to Mayor Johnson regarding loan & Grant for Sewer & water mains was read stating there were no more money available for Ocean City Projects.' The extension of the sewers had been laid on the table at the first meeting of 1938 until the year's financial requirements were known; it was still on the table when the year ended. The town spent 1938 borrowing against itself instead - $6,000 authorised in February, $10,000 in April from the Salisbury National Bank on notes signed by the mayor and treasurer, and more in December to meet coupon and bond retirement. The same council paid $730 to have both water tanks cleaned and painted and talked about building its own electric plant if Washington would lend the money at no interest. It would not.
1939
Borrowing for the pipes
**1939 is the year Ocean City borrows for the pipes, and the order is backwards from beginning to end.** The disposal plant was accepted in 1937. In 1938 the town discovered the power to compel people to connect to it. Only in 1939 does it borrow to build the laterals that would let them - and it needed an act of the General Assembly to do it. Chapter 269, approved 13 April as an emergency law, empowered the town to issue $10,000 of coupon bonds 'for the purpose of improving the sewerage system of said town by construction of lateral sewers to connect with the sewerage disposal system recently completed in Ocean City under a Public Works Administration project'. They were styled the 'Ocean City Sewerage and Improvement Bonds of 1939', one retiring each year from 1940 to 1949, and were sold on 23 May to Stein Bros. & Boyce at 103.939. **Water is the harder story.** The town's own statement of 13 July shows three years of uncollected water rent - 1936, 1937 and 1938 - inside $17,777.00 of arrears, while budgeting $13,500 of water rent as its largest single item of 1940 income. In October it opened bids for four new artesian wells at the north pump station to supply 250 gallons a minute each, and took Shannahan of St Michaels **on the non-guaranteed basis** - a dollar and five cents a foot cheaper, in exchange for giving up any promise that the wells would produce. **A town three years behind on its water bills, betting on wells it has not required anyone to guarantee.** Set against that, the same year's refusals: no sanitary inspector at $450, and the shanties on St. Louis Avenue handed to the state to be got rid of rather than connected.
1940
The cheaper bid without a guarantee
The cheaper bid without a guarantee, taken in October 1939 for four artesian wells, produced a fifth well in January 1940 and a twenty-cent rise in the tax rate by July - and the minute of 8 July is the only rate decision in this campaign's record that shows its own arithmetic. The county's assessment came in lower than the town's own, even with 1939's new building added; the wells for the north pump station had to be carried over; the notes had to be retired. So the rate went to $1.20 on a smaller base. Being assessed by somebody else cost Ocean City twenty cents on the hundred, and the town had been required by law to adopt the county's figures - a fact its own clerk recorded on 2 January, six months before anyone worked out what it would mean. Set against that, September's business is the clearest sign in the whole decade that the Depression municipality was solvent again: the new council's first act was to cancel $8,000 of treasury bonds left over from building the sanitary sewer, six weeks after the outgoing one had charged off four small debts totalling $52.28 and told the secretary to pay off every note before the fiscal year closed. A town told by Washington in December 1938 that there was no more money finished 1940 retiring debt it had never needed to issue.
1941
Holding its edges on a very thin year
The utilities story of 1941 is a town holding its edges on a very short rope. It painted and cleaned its water tanks — George Elliott, $450, ordered 31 October. It agreed to bulkhead fifty feet across the end of 9th Street on 13 November, but only because Mrs George Purnell would not build on lot 34 unless it did, and only on terms that she pay for twenty-five feet of tie-back herself: the bay was taking the street, and the town bought the repair with somebody else's investment. It held the tax rate at $1.20 the hundred, the rate it had raised in 1940 specifically to carry the notes on the north pump station's new wells. And it borrowed four times in the year to stay level — $5,000 from the Bank of Ocean City by 1 May, $5,000 on notes of the First National Bank in April, and again from the Bank of Ocean City in December to meet bonds and coupons falling due on 1 January — while still signing papers, eight years after the bank holiday, for 'distribution of tied up funds in Bank'. Against that, one piece of genuine new plant: on 21 March, in a session reconvened after the meeting had already adjourned, the council leased the northwest corner of Philadelphia Avenue and North Fourteenth Street to the Eastern Shore Gas Company for a storage tank — twenty years at a hundred dollars a year, on part of Lot 7, Block 53 North of the Sinepuxent Beach Company plat of 1875. A town that could not afford to bulkhead its own street without a bargain could still sell twenty years of ground for the price of a lifeguard's six weeks.
1942
Utilities in a year with no season
This thread argues that Ocean City kept acquiring utilities it could not keep, and 1942 adds a variation: a utility it could not control. The town did not own its electricity; it wrote letters to 'the local office of Electric Co.' asking for lamps to be changed. In October 1942 it asked for the Baltimore Avenue street light to be raised to 250 candle power — five weeks after the same council had told itself the town was 'dimed out and not sufficent light'. Between those two dates sits the whole problem: the light on the street was regulated by the Navy's dim-out, delivered by a private company, paid for by a town that had just struck its tax rate at $1.20 per hundred and was writing to people who had not paid their 1939 taxes. In September the council decided to clean the streets of grass and lower the South Division Street sewer 'before laying of our extra men' — the sewer work is what the town did with the labour it was about to shed at the end of a season that had barely happened. And the darkness was not the town's to set. The Army's dim-out order of early May 1942 curtailed street lighting in eight Worcester County towns including Ocean City, and required parking lights only on any vehicle approaching the resort. A town that could not choose how bright its own streets were spent October asking a private company for a stronger lamp on Baltimore Avenue. And on one night in April the town had no say at all: an order meant for the Coast Guard station put every light in Ocean City out, and the town's own officials learned why from the newspaper.
1943
The year it discovered it did not know where the pipes were
1943 is the year Ocean City discovered it did not know whether its water was any good. On 11 August the council put 'the necessity of examining our water supply' on the same evening's agenda as rebuilding the Boardwalk. By 15 September it was reading a letter from Shanahan on how to test the wells; by 1 December it was asking the well company whether the wells could be blown to clear their screens, what that would cost, and what it would cost to drive two more. In January 1944 it decided to do neither — to postpone additional wells and 'try flowing the wells our selves and see what results we had.' That is a town with $37,000 in the bank in September and a $5,000 government bond in December choosing to save money on its drinking water, which tells you what wartime municipal caution actually looked like. The light half of the thread runs the other way. In April the town signed a contract with the Eastern Shore Public Service Company 'to care for the change in lights for the duration' — five words that put the dim-out into a utility agreement — and in November, when the dim-out ended, it left the Boardwalk's dimmed system standing. Ocean City would rewire for the war on a contract and would not rewire back on an announcement.
1944
Two hundred dollars, and a five-year light contract
The war ends and Ocean City immediately starts spending on the utilities it had deferred. On 14 November 1944 Engineer Hall and Wallace Spring pressed the council to force every inhabited property onto city water and sewer, and the council spent a long discussion on how to get rid of the several house boats. On 28 November it accepted a five-year contract for relighting the city streets - the lights having been dimmed since 1942 and the dim-out lifted only that November - and signed it the same night. And on 19 December it paid Clark Gardner a flat $200 to survey a water main extension and get it approved by the Commission of Post War Planning. That $200 is the seed of the largest municipal project of 1945: plans signed in January, the State's acceptance in September with half the engineer's expenses paid, bids opened on 21 December and rejected as too dear on the 26th. The town entered 1946 with plans and no contract.
1945
The water main the town would not pay for
Ocean City's biggest post-war project of 1945 was a water main extension it never let. It began as a $200 flat fee to Clark Gardner in December 1944 to survey the work and get it approved; the plans went to Annapolis in January, and in September the Commission on Post War Reconstruction accepted the project on terms under which the State paid half the engineer's expenses. Gardner prepared the plans, and on 21 December the council opened two bids - George & Lynch through a Mr. McDermott, and a second contractor - and held them, certified checks and all, for consideration. Five days later it decided the price was too high and rejected them both. The town that had gone into 1945 borrowing $15,000 from the Bank of Ocean City in April and $6,000 more in May, and that finished July with $6,827.29 in the bank against $21,000 of notes, would not pay post-war prices for pipe. It entered 1946 with the plans, the State's money on the table, and no contract.
1946
1946
The post-war water extension that Ocean City could not afford in December 1945 is still unbuilt at the end of 1946, and the town changed instruments rather than prices. Having rejected both bids five days before Christmas 1945 as too high, it spent 1946 taking advice: on 22 October the clerk read a letter from Clarke Gardner - the same engineer who had carried the project since 1944 and who drew the zoning map in May - on bonds for water extensions, and on 15 November the council awarded Shannahan Artesian Well Co. the contract for driving two wells at the north end, with no price recorded. Nothing in the year says whether the mains were ever laid, and the State's acceptance of the project and its half-share of the engineering, secured in September 1945, go unmentioned. A sewer question of a different kind ran alongside it: on 31 May the town's lawyer wrote asking what record the town had of any conveyance from the Maryland Seashore Corporation, or from Mr. Potts or May Walton Potts, of any right of way or easement for the public sewer on Surf Avenue, the subdivision plat being out of the Clerk's Office to be photostated and preserved. The answer is not in the minute book either.
1957 · pivotal
The promise that made the annexation, and the bill that came with it
In January 1957 the council asked Mr. McComas of the Maryland State Department of Health a direct question: if the town annexed the ground from 26th to 41st Street, would the Health Department order it to provide water and sewerage? McComas said he did not know whether such an order would be issued, but the Department did have that authority — and suggested they consider installing sewerage at the same time as water. They annexed anyway, unanimously, on 28 May. The promise attached to it was water in four years and sewer in eight. The same year the town borrowed $75,000 for streets, sidewalks, water, sewerage and the boardwalk because its clerk had told the councilmen privately that a bond issue was needed to get Ocean City "out of the hole." Everything this thread does for the next thirty years is the working-out of a bargain struck in those two meetings: land first, pipes later, on credit.
1964 · pivotal
Six hundred and seventeen times in one year
Sewerage or water was discussed at **all forty-seven meetings of 1964, six hundred and seventeen times**. It was the year's entire business, because the eight years were almost up: "He recalled that when the area to 41st Street was annexed we had promised water in four years and sewer in eight — and the eight years is almost up. The reason for this is due to the State Board of Health pushing the joint sewer." What the council would not do was buy its way in, and the reasoning is the most candid sentence in the thread. Asked whether they were considering annexation rather than joining the Sanitary Commission, Councilman Kelley explained that the City did not want to spend half to three-quarters of a million dollars on a plant and its interceptors at 66th Street, "several blocks out of our town limits with never a thought of being able to annex that area" — and that "the chances of annexing was quite remote if facilities were made available prior to annexation." **Build the sewer first and you lose the reason anyone would join you.** That is how Ocean City grew, said out loud in a minute book, and it is why the pipes always ran behind the boundary.
1966
One district, Delaware line to inlet
After the town voted itself to the Delaware line in January 1965 on the votes of a hundred and six people, the utility had to be made to match. On 29 November 1966, after a public hearing in the courthouse, the County Commissioners and the Mayor and Council each passed a resolution enlarging the North Ocean City Sanitary District to take in the entire resort from the Delaware line to the inlet. It is the first structure of any kind to treat the 1965 boundary as one place. A county-wide sewer and water survey had been reported a fortnight earlier. The 1957 promise is answered here not by pipes but by jurisdiction — the administrative shape arriving years before the capacity does.
1977 · pivotal
The winter the pipes broke
The severe winter of 1976–77 froze the Chesapeake and broke Ocean City's water system, and the February meeting is a mayor accounting for an emergency in the first person. "I want some of the other people to get a little more overtime, I don't want one man working 100 and some hours … We've used as many as 17 from other departments … we have documented through the Engineering Department and the Water Department every break in the City, how deep it was, what material it was … It has been costly … I didn't care what it cost — I do care what it cost, but we did serve our people … We carried water to many places that couldn't get it and we went on a lot of people's lots and got the water pipes open." By May the engineers were designing against a repeat: the largest well out of service, a ground-level storage tank that could double as treatment, and the ability to move water from the south plant up to Gorman Avenue in an emergency — "the fact that you can move it, you're much better off than if you can't move water as you are now." A summer town discovers its infrastructure in the cold.
1979–1983
Refusing the mainland, and an outfall over Assateague
West Ocean City had a sewage problem and wanted Ocean City's plant to take it. The council refused, and did so by remembering its own history of being unable to build: taking it "could endanger the capability of the plant to service our own needs. [We] all went through one moratorium on building because of lack of city facilities." The alternative it named is startling in a thread that began with a barrier island: the mainland should spend its millions on a line down Baltimore and St. Louis Avenues "to a sewer plant in West Ocean City and the outfall over Assateague which everyone has agreed on." The island that had been a highway route, a subdivision, a park and an erosion problem is here also a sewer route. By February 1983 capacity has become doctrine: Resolution 1983-1 opposes a building moratorium arising from the northern interceptor's capacity, on the ground that a moratorium would have a chilling effect on developers and depress the tax base — the sewer argument and the growth argument fused into one document.
1979 on the timeline1983 on the timeline1986 on the timeline
2010
The sand inside the filters
Water is mentioned 1,785 times across 77 of 2010's ninety sessions, and bond 1,520 times across 45. The year is a water system being rebuilt on borrowed money, and it reads as a parts list: "44th STREET WTP AND GORMAN AVENUE WTP FILTER UPGRADES … Gorman Ave. WTP Vertical Filter Valves and Piping Work … Contingent Replacement of Sand Valves — 44." Forty-four sand valves, contingent. In 1988 the town's obsession was putting sand on the beach; in 2010 it is the sand inside its filters. Gorman Avenue is the same plant the 1977 engineers wanted to be able to move water to in an emergency, thirty-three years later and finally being rebuilt.
2012–2018
Power argued in a zoning hearing, and water arriving from below
The light half of this thread ends where it began — with an off-island utility the town does not control. In December 2012 a conditional use hearing on Delmarva Power's substation expansion in Caine Woods became the venue for the town's only substantial recorded argument about Hurricane Sandy. Delmarva's witness used the storm against burying the lines residents wanted underground: "if you went back and looked at the duration of outages during Hurricane Sandy, probably the longest outages were associated with customers that had underground electric service." Then in 2018 the water stops arriving through pipes and starts arriving through the street. HB1350 made nuisance-flooding planning compulsory from 1 July, and the town's staff report gave the condition a name — **"Downtown First-to-Flood Areas"** — while Coast Smart set the design figure at two feet of sea level rise. A thread that began in 1882 with getting water into the town ends with the town planning for water it cannot keep out.
What we still cannot show
Recorded by the research itself, with where the answer would come from.
- 1917–1927 **How the sewerage standoff ended is unknown.** The State Board of Health ordered a system in 1917; the town was still refusing in 1921 with the Governor suing it; the 1922 session passed nothing. The campaign has never found the resolution — whether the town complied, settled, was compelled, or simply outlasted the order. It is a dated, answerable question about the town's own government and the answer is not in any newspaper read so far.Where to look: maryland-state-archives — State Board of Health records and correspondence; Worcester County Circuit Court equity dockets; Ocean City municipal records
- 1913 The 1913 grant of the electric light franchise to the Delmarvia Company is recorded, but not its terms, its duration, or what the town received for a generating plant it had bought four years earlier. That transaction is the hinge of the whole electricity story and only the fact of it survives here.Where to look: maryland-state-archives — Ocean City ordinances and council minutes; Maryland Public Service Commission records
- 1926 The identity of the New York holding company that wired Ocean City to Laurel, Delaware after 1926 is not established, nor the terms. A town surrendering generation to an out-of-state utility in the 1920s is a common enough story nationally, but this record carries only the outcome.Where to look: maryland-state-archives — Maryland Public Service Commission; Delaware PSC; Eastern Shore Gas and Electric Company records
Threads that cross this one
Fire: a wooden town that kept burning, and a fire company that kept paradingThe Boardwalk: no founding date, because it was never foundedBlack Ocean City: present from the second season, recorded almost entirely by other peopleThe Inlet: sixty-four years of asking, and one night of weatherThe Railroad: the reason the town exists, and the thing it agreed to loseThe 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