How a Big Hurricane on Aug. 22, 1933 Created the Ocean City We Know Today

Ocean City dates its history back to 1875, but the resort town we know today really didn’t take shape until 83 years ago, on Aug. 22, 1933. That’s when a hellacious storm tore a hole through town and altered the course of its future forever.


Nobody gave names to storms back then, so this one is generally known only as “The Hurricane of 1933.” It arrived in the midst of one of the wickedest hurricane seasons ever–20 big storms formed in the North Atlantic that year.

The storm made landfall on Tuesday, Aug. 22. But before that, Ocean City had endured four long days of torrential rain. It’s hard to believe one of the newspaper accounts I reviewed, which says that 10 inches of rain fell on Ocean City on each and every one of those four days.

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