City on the Sand - by Mary Corddry (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In a little more than a hundred years, a wild and desolate barrier island in Maryland became a teeming resort city. The story began in 1875 when a group of Eastern Shore, Baltimore, and Philadelphia businessmen held a grand opening of a five-story frame building called the Atlantic Hotel, and offered surrounding lots for sale at $25 each. Skeptics observing the scene predicted disaster with the first bad storm. What follows is a narrative of shifting sands--and shifting fortunes--as the city weathered natural and economic setbacks and advances to become, every summer, Maryland's second-largest city. The narrative draws extensively on the memoirs of early resort residents and, most of all, on conservations with people who have given the town its distinctive character. This is an appealing portrait of an outstanding resort that has been a magnet to vacationers for more than a century.

About the Author

Mary Corddry was born in Harford County, Maryland, and now lives in Churchville, Maryland. Her writing career began at The Land, a journal published by a national, nonprofit conservation organization. Her reviews for that journal led to an invitation from The Baltimore Sun to review books in the agricultural field. In 1969 the Sun contacted her to become their Eastern Shore reporter during the boom period for vacation development on the Shore. In Ocean City the boom was coupled with an awakening environmental activism. The conflict of these forces was the subject of much of Mary Corddry's reporting during her seventeen years with the Sun.