St. Mary Star of the Sea, Ocean City, MD

July 4, 1875, marked the founding of the new seaside resort of Ocean City, Maryland

In 1877, Bishop Thomas A. Becker of the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, Delaware, traveled with several colleagues to Ocean City, Maryland, for a seaside religious retreat.  During that visit, the first Catholic Mass in Ocean City was celebrated in a lower room of the Atlantic Hotel.

By 1878, a functioning Catholic chapel had been established in a cottage rented by John Tracy, proprietor of the Atlantic Hotel.  Bishop Becker had arranged for the use of a room in the cottage as a provisional chapel.  The cottage, one of the first structures erected in Ocean City, stood on a lot a the southeast corner of Atlantic Avenue and Wicomico Street owned by a Philadelphia businessman John Myers, a stockholder in the Atlantic Hotel Company.  Today, the site is occupied by Dolle’s Candyland and the Cork Bar.  The chapel’s existence was noted in a report published in the Baltimore Sun on August 17, 1878: “The Roman Catholic visitors worship adjacent cottage [to the Atlantic Hotel], where, on a rudely constructed altar, Mass has been daily offered by one or more of the several priests of the archdiocese who have been here this season.”

As reported in The Sun on August 10, 2880, “Right Rev. Bishop Thos A. Becker celebrated mass and preached a sermon Sunday morning [August 8} in the new Catholic chapel, Star of the Sea; at Ocean City, Md.”

                            Excerpts taken from Ocean City Life-Saving Station Museum

https://www.ocmuseum.org/ocean-city-history-3/st-mary-star-of-the-sea-catholic-church