Millersburg Ferry
Millersburg, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
The only surviving ferry service across the Susquehanna began as early as 1825. Boats were poled by manpower until 1873, when the first paddlewheeler was acquired. In the 1920's, gasoline engines replaced steam power, and the paddlewheels were shifted from the side to the stern. The ferry landing is a short distance west.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Long before bridges tamed the Susquehanna, communities depended on ferries to cross Pennsylvania's broad, shallow river. The Millersburg service began around 1825 with flat boats pushed across by hand-poling, then modernized with a paddlewheeler in 1873 and gasoline engines in the 1920s. Remarkably, it endured as the last surviving wooden double-stern paddlewheel ferry on the river, a working relic of a vanished mode of travel.
Why it matters
It preserves a rare, living example of the river-ferry transportation that stitched together river towns across early America before the age of bridges.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
For the towns strung along the Susquehanna, the river was both a blessing and a barrier. It is one of the broad, shallow rivers of the eastern United States — wide enough to divide communities, yet often too shallow and treacherous for easy navigation. In the early 1800s, before bridges spanned it reliably, simply getting to the other side was a daily problem to be solved.
The answer, up and down American rivers in this era, was the ferry. A ferry knit the two banks into a single community, letting farmers reach markets, families visit relatives, and goods move toward the wider world. Where a bridge was too costly or the river too difficult, the ferry was the essential link.
This particular crossing began its service as early as 1825, in the era of the young republic, and it would go on to outlast nearly all its peers — carrying passengers into a modern age its founders could scarcely have imagined.
People & events
The story of this ferry is really a story of technology quietly evolving beneath a single, stubborn service. In its earliest days the boats were moved by pure human effort, poled across the water by hand — a slow, muscle-driven crossing at the mercy of the current.
That lasted until 1873, when the first paddlewheeler arrived and steam took over the work that arms had done for nearly half a century. It was a substantial leap: from human power to machine power, the same revolution reshaping transportation across the country, arriving here in the form of a river boat.
Then, in the 1920s, came another change. Gasoline engines replaced steam, and the paddlewheels were moved from the sides of the boat to the stern. Each upgrade let the ferry survive into a new era rather than being retired — a working craft repeatedly reinvented to keep doing the one job it had always done.
Its place in the American story
This crossing is described as the only surviving ferry service of its kind on the Susquehanna, and that survival is its real significance. Ferries once dotted America's rivers by the hundreds; the age of bridges and automobiles rendered nearly all of them obsolete and swept them away. To have one endure is to keep a living thread of that vanished world.
It also compresses a whole century of transportation history into a single service. In the arc from hand-poled boats to steam paddlewheels to gasoline engines, you can watch the broader American story of mechanization play out in miniature, on one stretch of water.
Most history of this kind reaches us only through museums and photographs. A ferry that kept running preserves the actual experience — the motion, the crossing, the feel of the river — rather than merely its memory. That makes it a rare and genuine survivor.
If you visit
The ferry landing lies a short distance west of the marker, so the marker is an invitation as much as an explanation — read it, then go find the water. This is a place where the history is not behind glass but out in the open air.
Let yourself feel the scale of the Susquehanna: broad, shallow, and slow, exactly the kind of river that made a ferry necessary in the first place. Standing at the bank, it's easy to understand why generations of travelers waited here for a boat rather than a bridge.
This is a wonderful anchor for a river-town road trip, the sort of stop that turns a drive into a story. You are visiting a genuinely rare survivor of an age when crossing a river was an event in itself — and that alone is worth slowing down for.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Nearby & related markers
Millersburg Ferry
Buffalo Township, PA · est. 1973
Across the Susquehanna from Millersburg, this Perry County landing anchored the last surviving ferry service on the river. Begun around 1825 with hand-poled boats, the crossing modernized to a paddlewheeler in 1873 and to gasoline power in the 1920s, when the wheels shifted to the stern. It endured as a rare working example of the river ferries that once linked Pennsylvania's river communities.
Pennsylvania Canal (Susquehanna Division)
Watts Township, PA · est. 1952
Running roughly 41 miles from Duncan's Island up to Northumberland, the Susquehanna Division opened around 1831 and worked until the turn of the twentieth century. Its thirteen locks, seven aqueducts, dam, and towpath bridge were a considerable feat of hand-dug engineering following the river's course. Travelers along this road can still spot traces of the old canal cut into the landscape.
Pennsylvania Canal
Reed Township, PA · est. 1952
Between 1826 and 1834 Pennsylvania built a sprawling state-owned system of canals and railroads meant to link Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Erie in a single web of inland trade. It embraced six main canal divisions and two railroads, a public works gamble to keep the state competitive with New York's Erie Canal. Here the Susquehanna, Juniata, and Eastern Divisions came together in a canal basin, one of the network's key junctions.
Pennsylvania Canal (Eastern Division)
Reed Township, PA · est. 1952
The Eastern Division of the Pennsylvania Canal, built between 1826 and 1833, carried iron, coal, and lumber along the lower Susquehanna and remained in use until 1901. Here at the old Clark's Ferry towpath bridge, canal boats crossed the wide river to continue their journeys. The Lykens Valley coal trade fed into the system from the east by way of the Wiconisco Canal, adding the region's anthracite to the flow of commerce.