Millersburg Ferry
Buffalo Township, Perry 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 east.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
It preserves a living piece of the ferry transportation that predated bridges and bound together the towns of the Susquehanna Valley.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the time this crossing began around 1825, the Susquehanna was the great dividing line and the great highway of central Pennsylvania at once. It was wide, shallow in places, prone to ice and flood, and stubbornly hard to bridge with the money and engineering of the early republic. For the towns strung along its banks, the river was both the reason they existed and the thing that kept them apart.
A ferry answered that problem cheaply. Long before a span of iron or stone could be justified, a flat boat and a strong back could move a farmer, a wagon, or a herd from one shore to the other. Perry County and the Millersburg side of the river lived by that kind of practical, small-scale transportation, the everyday machinery of a farming and milling economy.
The marker's own timeline is really a timeline of American power itself. Boats first moved by muscle, then by the steam paddlewheel that defined the 19th-century river, then by the gasoline engine that defined the 20th. To stand here is to watch three eras of technology pass across a single stretch of water.
People & events
The story here isn't a single dramatic event but a long act of persistence. For roughly half a century, the boats were poled across by hand — a labor that depended on knowing the river's moods, its shallows and its currents, in a way only someone who worked it daily could.
The first paddlewheeler arrived in the 1870s, and with it came the confident hiss of steam that was transforming travel everywhere in that generation. Then, in the 1920s, the crews made the change that let the service survive into the automobile age: they swapped steam for gasoline engines and moved the paddlewheels from the sides to the stern.
That last detail is quietly telling. A stern-mounted wheel is a working solution — it protects the paddles and suits the boat to its river. These were not decisions made by distant engineers but by people determined to keep a useful thing running, adapting the boats again and again rather than letting the crossing die.
Its place in the American story
Ferries like this one were once ordinary across America. Nearly every river town had one, and they knit the country together at the local scale that maps rarely show — the scale of getting to market, to church, to the next farm over. As bridges multiplied in the 19th and 20th centuries, those ferries vanished one by one, until most survived only as place-names: a 'Ferry Road' leading to a bank where no boat has landed in a lifetime.
What makes this landing worth a marker is that its crossing outlasted the others on the river. It stands for an entire lost layer of American transportation, the humble link that came before the bridge and the highway.
It is also a reminder that progress in this country was rarely a clean leap. It came as a series of adaptations — muscle to steam to gasoline — made by working people who kept improving the tool in front of them.
If you visit
Come to the water and let the river set the pace. This is a place to feel the scale of the Susquehanna — wide, shallow-looking, deceptively powerful — and to imagine how much nerve it once took to push a loaded boat across it by hand.
The marker notes that the landing lies a short distance east, so look toward the shore and picture the approach: the ramp down to the water, the boats waiting, the unhurried rhythm of a crossing that ran for generations. Watch the current and you'll understand why a stern-mounted wheel and a steady hand mattered.
It makes a fine stop on a slow drive through the river valley. Pair it with a walk along the bank, and let it reframe how you think about every bridge you cross for the rest of the trip — each one stands where a boat once did the same job, one wagon at a time.
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
Millersburg, PA · est. 1972
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.
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 (Juniata Division)
Penn Township, PA · est. 1952
In the canal-building fever of the late 1820s, Pennsylvania dug the Juniata Division as one link in its ambitious Main Line of Public Works, a state-financed answer to New York's wildly successful Erie Canal. Completed by 1833, this 127-mile stretch of water carried boats up the Juniata Valley to Hollidaysburg, where the extraordinary Allegheny Portage Railroad hoisted them over the mountains. A stone aqueduct just west of here ferried the towpath and canal across the river itself, and its abutment and piers still stand as ghosts of a vanished waterway.