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...