Now here's the one I really brought you out here for. You're driving down a wild, empty island — but if a few developers had gotten their way, you'd be rolling down the main street of a beach city right about now. There's a ghost town under these dunes. Let me tell you about the city that almost was.
Back in the nineteen-fifties, a group of investors looked at this long, empty barrier island and saw the next Ocean City — a booming resort. They platted out a development, called it Ocean Beach, and started selling. And sell it did: by the early sixties they'd sold something like five thousand, eight hundred lots. Streets were drawn on the maps. They laid down a paved road right down the island — folks called it Baltimore Boulevard — and a few dozen houses actually went up on the sand. A city was being born, lot by lot, right where your tires are.
And then came the night of March the sixth, nineteen sixty-two. A vicious nor'easter — the Ash Wednesday Storm — sat down on this coast through five straight high tides and just hammered it. The sea washed clean across the island, again and again. When the water finally pulled back, Baltimore Boulevard was in pieces, buried and broken, and nearly every one of those houses was gone — swept away or smashed to kindling. The dream of Ocean Beach drowned in a single storm.
And here's the beautiful part. That disaster is exactly why you get to drive an empty, wild island today. After the storm, cooler heads asked the obvious question — should people really be building a city on a sandbar the ocean walks across at will? The answer, in nineteen sixty-five, was to make it a National Seashore instead. Protected. Left wild. So every mile of open beach you're enjoying is here because a storm said no to a city. The ghost of Ocean Beach is under this sand — five thousand lots, a boulevard, a drowned ambition — and the horses graze right over the top of it, and never knew it was there.
Photo: AssateagueNPS · Public domain
