Steamboats Give Way to the New Bay Bridge
"There was a wharf where the steamboats came in. Right down at the foot of Prince George Street...The Tolchester boat used to come in and they'd pick up one thing or another, an dbring them all up Prince George Street. Cows, horses, whatever they were getting, pigs, everything came up the street...I always loved to go down to the wharf." - Margaret Moss Dowsett, Then Again...Annapolis, 1900-1965
The maiden voyage of the Baltimore Steam Packet Company's Chesapeake, the first steamboat to travel on the Bay, was an excursion between Baltimore and Annapolis that took place on 13 June 1813. By 1819, the steamboat Maryland stopped four times weekly in Annapolis while traveling between Easton and Baltimore. These vessels were the first of a fleet that would be the backbone of the Bay's transportation network for the next 150 years.
The Emma Giles and other regular scheduled steamboats, which by the 1880s numbered more than 40 vessels througout the Bay, moved crops and freight to and from Baltimore and carried passengers traveling the Chesapeake for business and pleasure. With two wharves, at the foot of King George and Prince George streets, Annapolis was one of the larger ports within a network that connected towns and railroads on opposite sides of the Bay.
A new ferry terminal opened at Sandy Point in 1943, removing the congestion of waiting vehicles from downtown Annapolis. But less than ten years later, with the increased availability of autmobiles, better roads, and the opening of the first span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in 1952, the steamboat and ferry service era came to an end. With it went a very different way of life.
Marker can be reached from Dock Street 0.1 miles from Market Space.
Courtesy hmdb.org
