Prohibition in Cape May County: Wetter Than the Atlantic

With its proximity to Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore, Cape May County was a perfect location for lawbreakers during Prohibition. Rumrunners operating along the Atlantic Seaboard and Delaware Bay teamed up with backwoods bootleggers to make Cape May County a bustling center of the era’s illegal liquor business. It seemed as if every house around Otten’s Harbor in Wildwood was a speakeasy. Bill McCoy would sail from the Caribbean to Jersey with undiluted rum, gaining praise as the real McCoy. When authorities eventually shut down Cape May’s Rum Row, the production of Jersey Lightning just moved to the Pine Barrens. Local historian Raymond Rebmann reveals how Cape May County turned from a sleepy beach community to a smuggler’s paradise in the 1920s.