Qualla: Pocomoke City, Maryland

Pocomoke City, Maryland: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY 4.0. Pocomoke means black water in the language of the Algonquian people who lived here before the English came. The river that gave the town its name still runs dark with tannins from the cypress swamps upstream, the same color as strong tea. The town stuck with the English name Newtown until 1878, when in a burst of civic enthusiasm the council reincorporated under the older Native word. They were trying to sound less generic. The black water flowed on either way.

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Image: CC BY 4.0

Pocomoke City, Maryland: From Stevens Ferry to a Railroad Town

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kej605, CC BY-SA 3.0. A ferry crossed the Pocomoke at this spot starting in the late seventeenth century. The settlement around it was called Stevens Landing, then Stevens Ferry, then in 1865 it was incorporated as Newtown. The town stayed small until the 1880s, when the trunk railroad line came throu...

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Image: Kej605 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pocomoke City, Maryland: The MarVa Theater and the Discovery Museum

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Fischer, CC BY 2.0. The MarVa Theater opened in 1927, an Art Deco auditorium known among acoustic engineers for the unusually clean sound it threw to the back rows. The marquee carries vertical letters spelling MARVA - a combination of Maryland and Virginia, the two states whose shorelines the theat...

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Image: Eric Fischer | CC BY 2.0

Pocomoke City, Maryland: The Lynchings of 1906 and 1933

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0. The friendliness in the town's nickname has limits and a history. On June 14, 1906, a farmhand named Edd Watson was murdered by a mob in Pocomoke City. Twenty-seven years later, in October 1933, George Armwood - a Black man from Pocomoke City who had been accused of assault - was...

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Image: Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pocomoke City, Maryland: The Firing of Kelvin Sewell

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tichnor Brothers, Publisher, Public domain. In 2015, the town fired Kelvin Sewell, its first Black police chief. The dismissal came without public explanation. Sewell joined two of his former officers, Lieutenant Lynell Green and Detective Franklin Savage, in a federal lawsuit alleging rampant racial discrimination and ret...

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Image: Tichnor Brothers, Publisher | Public domain

Pocomoke City, Maryland: Black Water and Wallops Island

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tichnor Brothers, Publisher, Public domain. The Pocomoke River winds south from Pocomoke City through cypress swamps and into Pocomoke Sound, then on into the Chesapeake. The town sits about 4 nautical miles west of the Virginia state line and about 12 nautical miles north-northwest of the NASA Wallops Flight Facility on W...

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Image: Tichnor Brothers, Publisher | Public domain