Millersburg Ferry: The Last of Its Kind

Just east of here, the Millersburg Ferry has been crossing the Susquehanna River since at least eighteen twenty-five, making it the only surviving ferry service on the entire length of that river.

For nearly fifty years, crews moved passengers and cargo by muscle alone, pushing long poles against the river bottom to coax flatboats from bank to bank. Then in eighteen seventy-three the operation acquired its first paddlewheeler, joining the steam age that was already transforming transportation everywhere else.

In time the steam engines gave way to internal combustion engines, and the paddlewheels migrated from the sides of the hull to the stern, giving the boats a more modern silhouette while keeping the same unhurried crossing.

Today the Millersburg Ferry still runs in warmer months, one of the last of its kind, carrying cars and cyclists across a stretch of the Susquehanna that no bridge interrupts for miles in either direction.