By ERIC AVEDISSIAN/Sentinel staff
Loretta Thompson Harris speaks at the Ocean City Free Public Library last week.
OCEAN CITY – For Loretta Thompson Harris, the envelope held all the answers.
In 1993, she received a letter from a relative on her mother’s side.
One day she was sitting outside on the steps with her father and mentioned the letter. He told her how her great-grandfather had a delivery franchise in Ocean City. She pulled the envelope out and jotted it down. A few days later her father said her aunt had the family Bible.
Leafing through the Bible, she found out her great-grandfather, John Brooks Thompson, lived a block from where she was living at the time. She also discovered that he was buried in a cemetery next to her house.
“I had passed that cemetery and his gravesite for years not knowing that he was there,” said Thompson Harris, who retired from the Atlantic City Electric Company after 30 years and now lives in Upper Township. “I’ve been hooked on this since making that discovery.”
Every time she discovered something about the family, she wrote the information on the envelope.
The envelope turned into decades of research on Ocean City’s African-American community, called the Westside.
Thompson Harris shared her family’s history and the history of the local black community with AARP Chapter 1062 at Ocean City Free Public Library on Feb. 21.
“Now I know it can be uncomfortable to talk about black, white, racism, segregation, all those things but I think it’s something that we need to do. It’s the only way we’ll ever get beyond the point where it’s uncomfortable,” Thompson Harris said to those gathered. “So I say to you, bridge the gap. Jump in. It’s safe.”
Thompson Harris is a fourth generation Thompson to live in and around Ocean City. The Thompsons were one of the earliest black families to make Ocean City their home.
She has been researching Ocean City’s African-American history for 25 years and is writing a book on that community.
“Our history is not well documented. Sometimes the history as told is sometimes incomplete or inaccurate. Many families don’t care to share their history. I think it’s often because they do now know their history. I did not know my history. I think that’s true just in the black community, but in the white community as well,” Thompson Harris said. “History for people of color has typically been marginalized.”
Notable family names included Henry, Turner, and Ford. She made profiles for each family member, creating a family tree. Her profiles extended to individuals going back generations.
She traced her ancestry back to 1760 in Salem County on the Thompson line, but she has other family lines going back earlier.
Jacob Still was the first African-American to arrive in Ocean City in 1885, a few years after the city’s founding in 1879.
Her great grandparents, John Brooks Thompson and Sarah Jackson, arrived in Ocean City from Salem by way of Millville around “1900 or 1901.”
Thompson Harris concluded her great-grandfather was on a religious mission when he arrived. She researched founders of St. James African Methodist Episcopal church traveled through Salem and were all the same age, and came to Ocean City at the same time, before the church was founded.
Once in Ocean City, her great-grandfather started his own livery business, Union Express Transfer & Freihofer, located at the old railway station at 10th Street and Haven Avenue. She said the business consisted of a wagon and a horse named “Tom the Horse.” He later would have a truck delivery franchise with Freihofer Baking Co.
Thompson Harris’s grandparents were Joseph Armour Thompson and Henrietta Bowman.
Her grandfather was a police officer with the Ocean City Police Department, the second black policeman in the city’s history. Thompson’s parents were Sylvester “Pete” Willis Thompson and Dorothy Gordon. Her father was born on New Year’s Day 1914 in Ocean City.
Sylvester “Pete” Willis Thompson was one of five children who quit school at the 10th grade to help support the family. By age 25, he was a dock builder and contractor.
Sylvester Thompson & Son, Inc. installed many piling and foundations for some prominent buildings, including the Ocean City Music Pier, Ocean City Recreation Center, Ocean City Primary School, Stoeco Homes’ Merion Park Housing Project. He also worked on the Manayunk Canal Bulkhead and Bike Path project in Philadelphia, Pa.
Mayor Jay Gillian told the Ocean City Sentinel in 2018, “The Thompsons built most of this city.” Gillian delivered his remarks at an opening of an Ocean City Historical Museum’s exhibit on the local African-American community.
Thompson said she discovered a truck door with her father’s construction company logo in a junkyard. She recalled how she had never seen the logo before.
The second part of her presentation focused on the Westside neighborhood, which extended roughly from Second to 10th streets, and West Avenue to the bay. She said the Westside had black and Italian families, working class families with their own homes and businesses.
Widow’s Row at the 600 block of Haven Avenue was a stretch of 11 modest row house. It got its curious moniker because eight of the homes were occupied by women whose husbands had died.
“I didn’t know it was called Widow’s Row for a long time. That was another little tidbit my father shared with me,” Thompson Harris said.
The homes still exist, but two properties were demolished and replaced by a single-family home, leaving nine original row houses.
“At one time there was a plan to get some funding to upgrade the neighborhood, but when they said upgrade the neighborhood, what they really meant was tear these houses down and put in new little single family homes. That sounded great. When I asked if the people who were being displaced would have a chance to buy these new homes, they said no,” Thompson Harris said. “I said if you’re not going to give them a chance to buy into the new homes, how are you going to get their properties? They guy looked at me and said, ‘eminent domain.’ They cared not for the people but just for the work they wanted to do.”
She said despite efforts to demolish them, the houses are still there.
Thompson Harris said Widow’s Row originally had dirt streets and all houses had outhouses and lacked plumbing. The homes have been upgraded over the years, Thompson Harris said, noting that while on the outside they might have looked rough, on the inside the homes were filled with love, pride and families.
The Westside neighborhood had four churches, Thompson Harris said, “that have stood the test of time”: Macedonia United Methodist at 10th Street and Simpson Avenue; Tabernacle Baptist at Eighth Street and West Avenue; St. James African Methodist Episcopal at Seventh Street and Haven Avenue; and Shiloh Baptist at 10th Street and Wesley Avenue.
Notable Westside businesses included Alice’s Store, Turner’s Mobil Gas, Sample’s Tea Room, Morgan’s Soda Fountain, and Bolden Rooming House.
William Brown of William Brown Hauling Inc. on Seventh Street and Simpson Avenue made a fortune with his hauling business and real estate, Thompson Harris said, adding he owned “seven or eight properties here in Ocean City.”
“When he passed he was a multi-multi-millionaire,” she said. The neighborhood had abundant laundries, dressmakers, barbershops, pool halls and restaurants.
“You name it and I think we had it,” Thompson Harris said.
There were many Westside success stories.
John Trower was probably the biggest businessman in town in the early 1900s, owning 16 properties in Ocean City and one in Sea Isle City. He used to loan money to local politicians, Thompson Harris noted.
A number of local black men served in the military, she said.
Archie Haggie Harris, Jr. was an accomplished athlete who served in World War II and was a Tuskegee Airman. He was a skilled football player and athlete who had records in track and field. Thompson Harris said he would have gone to the Olympics but the war broke out. After the war, he returned home and became an Ocean City police officer.
Local black residents who served in the Civil War included John W. Brown, Joseph Brown Jacob Still and David M. Wells. Black World War I soldiers from Ocean City included Otto Wade Thompson, Newlin D. Turner, Leonard Wiggins, and Charles Clark.
The Ocean City Police Department had its share of African-American officers, including Newlin Turner, Joseph Armour Thompson, Timothy Allen Harris, Aaron Edward Harvey Bernard “Sarge” Morris, John Morris, and William Spruil to name a few.
“Of course these were jobs that are hard to get for black people, you know that,” she said.
Thompson Harris’s uncle, Albert Thompson, was a lifeguard on the Ocean City Beach Patrol.
“They tell me when he tried out for the beach patrol he left everyone else in his wake,” Thompson Harris said. “They had to bring Uncle Al on early because so many people were frequenting the beach.”
She said Ocean City had a blacks-only beach in the past.
“I grew up in the fifties. I remember being shooed back to our beach,” Thompson Harris said.
Asked if there’s still discrimination in the city today, Thompson Harris said there was.
She recalled how as a girl, the family started out in a 16-foot-wide row house on Widow’s Row and moved to a bigger house across the street.
“It was nice to be in a bigger place with more than one bathroom,” she said.