S.S. State of Pennsylvania, The Ballroom Steamer
Near Wilmington, Delaware
In nineteen twenty-three, the Pusey and Jones shipyard on the Christina River in Wilmington launched a riverboat designed not for cargo but for dancing. The State of Pennsylvania could carry thirty-five hundred passengers, and at the center of her main deck sat a three-thousand-square-foot ballroom where a live orchestra played every cruise. She ran between Wilmington, Chester, and Philadelphia for nearly four decades, with moonlight excursions going for fifty cents a ticket.
In nineteen seventy she sank at her dock in the Christina River, and her hull was finally scrapped in two thousand five. By then she had been on the National Register of Historic Places for more than twenty years, recognized as a rare surviving example of the golden age of Delaware River excursion steamers.
