Steamboats engineered change along the Chesapeake

Inside the foyer of the Steamboat Era Museum in Irvington, VA, 200 small white lights illuminate a map of the Chesapeake Bay. Together, they trace a constellation along the estuary’s shorelines, meandering up its rivers and marking ports of call for the large fleet of steamships that traversed these waters for nearly 150 years.

“Once people see the map,” said Barbara Brecher, director of the museum, “it makes perfect sense to them that the steamboat was the engine of commerce, life — virtually everything.”

If you follow the history of the Chesapeake Bay steamboat era, you’ll learn much about the Bay region as a whole. The rise and fall of these vessels between 1813 and 1962 is, in many ways, the story of lives and communities connected by water and enhanced by the power of steam.

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