The Millersburg Ferry: Last of the River Crossings
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Somewhere just off this stretch of road, the Susquehanna River is a mile wide and moving fast. And if you drove down to the waterfront in Millersburg, you would find something that has no business still existing: a pair of wooden double stern-wheel paddle boats, hand-built of white pine, making the same crossing that ferries have made on this river since before the United States was a country.
The Millersburg Ferry is the last operating ferry on the entire four-hundred-sixty-four miles of the Susquehanna, and the last known wooden double stern-wheel paddle boat in commercial service in the United States. The two boats, called the Roaring Bull and the Falcon, are the latest in a line of vessels bearing those names, the current Roaring Bull built in nineteen ninety-eight and the current Falcon in nineteen seventy-four. Their hulls are white pine planking over timber frames. The flat barges they push are eighty-three feet long. Together they can carry a car and several passengers across the mile of river in about twelve minutes.
Ferries have crossed here since at least the seventeen sixties, when maps show an early crossing at this location. The first recorded operators appear in documents from eighteen seventeen. The crossing went from pole-powered bateau to a steam side-wheeler in eighteen seventy-three, then to the current wooden paddle boats in the early twentieth century. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission designated the ferry as historically significant in nineteen seventy-three, and it joined the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand six.
The ferry runs seasonally, from late spring through early fall, whenever the river is low enough and the weather cooperates. It carries a few dozen cars a day, maybe more on summer weekends. It is a stubborn thing, this crossing. Every bridge in this valley was built partly to replace it, and yet here it is, still running, the river doing what the river always has, and two wooden boats doing what they have always done.
