Pocomoke City, MD

Description

Pocomoke City, dubbed “the friendliest town on the Eastern Shore”, is in Worcester County. Although renamed in a burst of civic enthusiasm in 1878, the city is regularly referred to by its inhabitants simply as Pocomoke. It is part of the Salisbury, Maryland-Delaware Metropolitan Statistical Area. Pocomoke City is a center for commerce on the lower shore, home to an industrial park currently playing host to defense contractors, aerospace engineering, and plastics fabrication. Pocomoke City is located near the Wallops Island Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Virginia.

Beginning in the late seventeenth century, a small settlement called Stevens Landing (sometimes Stevens Ferry) grew at the ferry landing on the south bank of the Pocomoke River. The town was incorporated as Newtown (or New Town) in 1865, but was reincorporated in 1878 as Pocomoke City, after the American Indian name of the river, meaning “black water.”

Stevens Landing, and then Newtown, remained a modest river crossing until the construction through the town in the 1880s of the trunk railroad line along the Delmarva Peninsula from Wilmington, Delaware, to Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The line eventually became part of the Pennsylvania Railroad. In addition to agriculture, industry such as lumber milling and shipbuilding and, in the twentieth century, factories making barrels and baskets for truck crops, and the canning of those crops, aided the town’s growth.

In 1922, the business district of Pocomoke City was destroyed in a large fire; on one side of town this continued up to the church on third Street, known as St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, but the downtown was quickly rebuilt. While truck farming declined during the 1900s, the poultry industry rose to take its place. NASA, the U.S. Navy, and the Coast Guard helped with continued growth by bringing jobs to the area.

Pocomoke City was named an All-America City by the National Municipal League, and for the years 1984-85, Pocomoke City was one of the nine Finalist Communities.

LEASING CONTACT:

GRAHAM HELTON, 662.571.1831, graham@apusa1.com