The Marine Society admitted no new members from 1861 to 1864, then six in 1865. Towards the end of the century a peak year was 1890, with the admission of twenty-eight members. But apparently by 1888 membership in the Society had decreased to twenty-three, and recruiting efforts sparked a good deal of controversy. At issue was a practice begun in 1889 of holding an annual banquet "with a view to increase the membership and make our members acquainted with each other, the expense to be paid for from the income of the society." There were members, though, who claimed that the expense of an annual get-together had reduced the amount available for "widows and orphans" from one hundred to seventy-five dollars each year and that, as member Harlan Prince of Yarmouth put it, the founders of the Marine Society would "turn over in their graves if they knew that the money of the society was being thus diverted from its proper channels." Another member, Benjamin E Woodbury, grew so incensed that Treasurer William Leavitt "improperly and unlawfully withdrew from the funds...the sum of one hundred and thirty-six dollars" for the 1894 banquet at the Falmouth Hotel that he sued the Society and Leavitt. Apparently he had attempted to get an injunction, which a lower court refused. In any case, Woodbury’s appeals reached the Supreme Judicial Court twice, in 1897 and 1900, and were turned down both times. Meanwhile, a group of eight members petitioned the legislature for a change in the charter to enable the Society to pay for an annual banquet without having to defend itself court. This died in committee, but not before President Enoch Willard had written quite a delightful letter opposing the charter change.
Willard conceded that the membership had dwindled, and that it had increased, but the change had been "by the efforts of a few members and not by banquets, by any means, and I think if banquets made members, they would be exceedingly poor or cheap ones." He also pointed out that in 1894, when the Society footed the bill, the cost was $5.70 per head but the f ollowing year, when those present paid the tab, it was only $1.50. "It makes quite a difference when the society pays the bill, as you will see.
The controversy over funding notwithstanding, the Society held its Centennial banquet at the Falmouth Hotel on the evening of 27 February 1896 with twenty-five members and twenty-one invited guests in attendance. At a meeting of the Society on 3 February it was voted that members were not to be permitted to invite guests personally but that the Centennial Committee—Captains John W. Deering, James Keazer, J. S. Winslow, Charles S. Chase, William Leavitt and William Thompson—were to "invite the distinguished gentlemen who are to be the guests and speakers of the evening, in the name of the society." Among the invitees were Maine’s Governor Henry Cleaves, Portland’s Mayor James P. Baxter, several judges, and Captain R.G.E Candage, representing the Boston Marine Society. Colonel John M. Adams, editor of Portland’s Eastern Argus, does not appear on the guest list in the account of the affair later published as a pamphlet by the Society, but he spoke at the banquet and editorialized the next day that, "the space given in our columns this morning to a report of the toast responses may be taken as an indication of the high respect and esteem in which this Society is held in this community as well as a tribute to the universal excellence of the responses themselves."
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