The battle for Rehoboth Beach: A town of saints and sinners

In his new book, Queering Rehoboth Beach, author James T. Sears draws upon extensive oral history accounts, archival material, and personal narratives to chronicle “the Battle for Rehoboth,” which unfolded in the late 20th century, as conservative town leaders and homeowners opposed progressive entrepreneurs and gay activists.

In the farm soil of the late nineteenth century that became Rehoboth, Methodist evangelists sowed seeds of fellowship and unity by works of mercy and piety. Some grew amid thorns of discord, others were trodden on the path of avarice, and a few fell between rocks of intemperance. These were early tensions between commercialism and evangelism, between the Great Awakening in revivalism and the Great Convulsion in real estate, and between believers of the sacred and practitioners of the profane. These divisions, streaming through the town’s 150-year history, were laid bare during what the Washington Post Magazine would headline as “The Battle for Rehoboth.”

….

Pack your bags, we’re going on an adventure

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for the best LGBTQ+ travel guides, stories, and more.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

This archetypal 1870s and 1880s conflict between an emerging secularized business class, seemingly fueled by hordes of Visigoth interlopers and Bacchanal vacationers, versus religious conservatives and gentry property owners, supported by sullied politicians, is strikingly parallel to the “Battle for Rehoboth” a century later.

….

Today, Rehoboth residents, although distant in time from their Methodist forbearers, are as homogenous as the town’s boundaries are narrow. Within a square mile of land are fewer than 1,500 souls, 98 percent White, a median age of sixty-five, and $100k+ household income. A short walk north, past the mile-and-a-quarter wooden-plank boardwalk and just over the town line, is Deauville Beach. To its northwest is the even smaller village of Henlopen Acres. Col. Wilbur Corkran, an architect and engineer, established this private community in 1930, exclusively for a “quiet-loving, cultured people.” Like many American communities formed during this era, racial covenant restricted ownership to people of “the Caucasian Race.” Although such covenants were judged unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948 and made illegal twenty years later, it was not stricken until 1982. Today, only four of its 102 residents are non-White. Farther north lies Cape Henlopen, a state park whose public land was established centuries ago by William Penn, and old Fort Miles. Wedged between the park and Henlopen Acres is North Shores community and North Beach, an area formerly known as Whiskey Beach. At the southern end of the boardwalk, near Queen Street, is Poodle Beach, where gays have sunbathed since the early 1980s, when they tired of hauling coolers and volleyball nets past the Carpenter’s compound. Farther south lies a two-block sliver of land separating Rehoboth Bay from Atlantic waters, mile-long Dewey Beach. Here, generations have been drinking, dancing, and gaming, first at the nineteenth-century Douglass House, then the Depression-era Harry Shaud’s Bottle & Cork, then the rock-n-roll-era Starboard and, later, the Rusty Rudder.

Water protects Rehoboth’s eastern and western borders. The Atlantic’s surf and breeze attract beachgoers, but its storms have ravaged the boardwalk and swept out to sea businesses and homes as well as bathhouses and pavilions. In 1903, the newly built Horn Pier, jutting 150 feet into the ocean, was destroyed, as was much of the hundred-foot-wide Surf Avenue adjacent to the beach. The Great Storm of 1913 completely washed that street off the map and destroyed the boardwalk, pier, and a rebuilt Horn’s Pavilion. But “nothing compared” to the Ash Wednesday Nor’easter of 1962. As one veteran of both storms recounted, “That [1913] storm was just a good blow compared to this one.” Its gale force winds with forty-foot waves not only wrecked the boardwalk and battered its hotels but flooded businesses far up Rehoboth Avenue.

Across the decades, it has been no less quiet on Rehoboth’s western front. The Lewes-Rehoboth Canal, completed in 1916, sliced through “the Grove,” the original camp meeting site, to connect the Chesapeake and Rehoboth Bays. With the canal serving as a water thoroughfare, canneries processed tomatoes, lima and string beans, and peas. The canal, too, separated the town’s residents from an unincorporated spit of land occupied by Blacks; Whites separately christened it “West Rehoboth.”

Glen Thompson, who would figure prominently in the “Battle for Rehoboth,” frequented the Bloody Bucket when he was underage, visiting from DC in the 1950s. “When this area was totally segregated, White people didn’t want Black people in their bars,” Thompson explains. So, “they would set up in their house or garage a little business where they sold liquor. The state knew about it, did nothing.”

….

Thompson’s future nemesis, Joyce Felton, also sojourned West of Rehoboth, frequenting the 007 Club during the early 1980s. She describes it as “a community unto itself.” Across the canal in Rehoboth, “there was not a whole lot of Black presence in the day-to-day except in the service industry. There were kind of lines in the sand.” When the canal could no longer impede pent-up real estate demand, many properties fell under the bulldozer’s blade driven by speculators, clearing the land for craft beer brewers, luxury homebuyers, and franchise businesses.

Billed as “the Nation’s Summer Capital,” Rehoboth Beach has long been a town for Washington’s elite seeking solace in sun and surf. Politicians and their families have summered over the decades. Richard Nixon brought his family in the late 1950s, and years later “the girls” rented a house. Lynda Byrd Johnson, with then-boyfriend Chuck Robb, enjoyed partying at Whiskey Beach and then moving her retinue to the swank Henlopen Hotel. It is now the “summer White House” for the Biden family. On some summer mornings during the 1970s, walkers could spot Judge John Sirica walking the boards, while syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, disliking the boardwalk crowds, hunkered down for summer weekends with some of his nine children. There, too, were former ambassadors, owners of professional sports teams, and Fortune 500 executives.

The disgraced have also walked along Rehoboth’s tree-lined streets. Outed former Maryland congressman Robert Bauman strolled arm-in-arm through town with two effeminate-looking men. Former Rehoboth lifeguard Michael “Sean” Scanlon laundered his illegal lobbying monies with Jack Abramoff at their fake American International Center on Baltimore Avenue. In short, Rehoboth, as longtime newspaper man Dan Terrell writes, is a town of saints and sinners. At times, it has been difficult to distinguish between them.