In 1875, a four-hundred-room wooden hotel opened on a barrier island off Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and a town built on sand began selling itself as permanent. This is the story of Ocean City, Maryland — from the grand Atlantic Hotel and the widows of the Petticoat Regime who ran the early boardwalk, through the 1925 fire that leveled downtown, the 1933 hurricane that ripped the island in half and accidentally created a world-class fishing port, the Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962 that buried the town alive, and the 1970s condo boom that replaced Victorian porches with a mile of concrete high-rises. Every disaster was followed by a bigger, more expensive rebuild. Now the beach itself is vanishing, and the Army Corps of Engineers pumps forty million dollars’ worth of sand back onto the shore every four years just to keep the ocean from taking it all back.
Sources
Maryland Center for History and Culture — “Ocean City: The Great Hurricane of 1933” and “The Great March Storm of 1962,” including preserved 1933 film footage and Bodine photographs
National Park Service Administrative History — Assateague Island: The Becoming of the Seashore, chapters on the Ocean Beach subdivision and Leon Ackerman’s development (nps.gov/parkhistory)
Ocean City Life-Saving Station Museum collections and curator Christine Okerblom’s accounts of the 1933 inlet formation (via WBOC, August 2023)
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Baltimore District — Atlantic Coast of Maryland Shoreline Protection Project documentation and beach replenishment cost records
The Baltimore Banner — “Ocean City’s 150-year ride from fishing village to beach town” (May 2025) and “The foreign employees Ocean City depends on — and the price they pay” (September 2025)
Secrets of the Eastern Shore — Jim Duffy’s accounts of Rosalie Tilghman Shreve and the Plimhimmon Hotel, and the Hurricane of 1933’s role in creating the modern resort
source
