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Steamboat Era Museum Executive Director Barbara Brecher is pictured below in front of the Pilot the Potomac Home fundraising campaign display.
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The pilothouse detail above has been highlighted in a detail of a painting by John MacLeod to illustrate for museum visitors the structure’s relationship to the steamer Potomac.
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The pilothouse’s wheel pictured above left is approximately six feet tall. While the Steamboat Era Museum can’t prove it is the original wheel from the pilothouse, it was built in Philadelphia around the time as the Potomac.
Coming soon to the Northern Neck at the Steamboat Era Museum in Irvington will be an exhibit unlike any other in the U.S. The museum will feature a fully restored pilothouse off the workhorse steamboat the Potomac, a marvelous remnant from an era that shaped and defined life on the Chesapeake Bay and the Northern Neck like no other time.
The Steamboat Era is known as a glorious period on the Chesapeake Bay that spanned the 19th and 20th centuries. It was an era that transformed the Northern Neck. The region went from an isolated, insulated area largely shut off from the outside world to a thriving hub of enterprise, where community wharves were essentially old school shopping malls.
The Steamboat Era opened up profitable new markets for watermen and farmers, who could finally plant crops on all their acreage because demand calibrated with supply. It was also a period when a steamboat’s distinctive whistle was the siren call for entire communities to gather at the local wharf.
On the wharves in communities up and down the bay’s myriad of tributaries, when a steamboat arrived residents had a lifeline to the outside world. They could get their mail and newspapers, pick up their suits and dresses supplied by big city tailors, claim their kids’ Christmas toys and even haul away entire Sears Roebuck houses ordered from a catalog. They could also ship out the fruits of their labors, which brought a semblance of prosperity to the region.
Eighty years after the last steamboat to ply the waters of Chesapeake Bay docked for good and brought to a close the remarkable steamboat era, a rebirth of the period is occurring at the Steamboat Era Museum. And it’s a rebirth with the authentic Potomac pilothouse serving as a living link to an era that’s told with gusto in the museum.
The museum is “all about people,” said Barbara Brecher, executive director of the Steamboat Era Museum. “And it’s about lives and all about stories.
The Potomac’s pilothouse is the last remaining known structure of its kind off a Chesapeake Bay steamboat. The Potomac chugged for 40 years up and down the bay and its tributaries, hauling people and freight and connecting remote communities to the big cities such as Baltimore and Norfolk.
The 176-foot-long Potomac was built in Philadelphia in 1894. At 41 feet at the beam, the boat had 37 staterooms and ran freight and passengers out of Baltimore to destinations on the Potomac River. The Potomac also operated between Baltimore and Norfolk and made stops all along the Rappahannock River and on the Northern Neck.
Taken out of service in 1936, the Potomac was sold to Colonna Shipyard in Norfolk to be decommissioned. Shipyard owners Ben and Willough by Colonna saved the pilothouse, dropped it onto a barge and hauled it up the Rappahannock. For several years it served as the family’s summer cottage on Taft’s Beach at White Point. It was later acquired by the Steamboat Era Museum.
The Potomac pilothouse is undergoing an extensiverestoration after years of neglect and will become themuseum’s signature indoor exhibit in the near future. Brecher calls it a national treasure, and in 2015 it was chosen as one of Virginia’s 10 Most Endangered Artifacts.
Officially, the Steamboat Era ran from 1813 to 1937. For the Northern Neck, the Steamboat Era picked up steam in the latter part of the 19th century. Surrounded by water and with very limited travel options to the outside world, the Northern Neck was largely on its own.
The Chesapeake Bay steamboats changed all that. The transformation is documented exquisitely inside the Steamboat Era Museum. With relics, films, period pieces, models of the boats and wharves and many other features, the exhibits in the museum draw people from across the country, many of whom rave about it.
Richmond area resident Matt Prosser, for example, gave the museum five-stars—out of five—on a recent Google review. “Excellent, informative, polite, child-friendly staff,” Prosser wrote. “It’s small, but packed with informative displays. The models are incredible.”
Like many museums across the U.S., the Steamboat Era Museumfaces the daunting challenge of finances, particularly fundraising at a time it’s in the midst of a $350,000 capital campaign to restore the Potomac pilothouse. Memberships are crucial to retain, Brecher said. “We must raise the funds that are necessary to preserve the history of this region for future generations. The Steamboat Era Museum represents a link to a time that helped define the Northern Neck way of life and culture.”
Brecher lives in Lottsburg, relocating permanently from Old Town Alexandria—she had bought her house in 1994 and was a weekender until 2010—after retiring from a graphic design studio she owned and operated. She took the helm of the Steamboat Era Museum in 2013 after seeing the job in a newspaper ad.
“This is so cool,” Brecher recalls thinking. “Working for a museum… What could be more fascinating and challenging?”
You can help bring the Steamer Potomac’s Pilothouse to Steamboat Era Museum in Irvington.
The Steamboat Era Museum announced the public phase of the Pilot the Potomac Home campaign with a dollar for dollar $50,000 grant from the Mary Morton Parsons Foundation in Richmond. Every dollar donated after mid-May, will be matched up to $50,000! This grant is one more step in the process of restoring and placing the Steamer Potomac’s Pilothouse, the largest remaining portion of a Chesapeake Bay steamboat, in the museum. Go to steamboateramuseum.org to read more about this exciting grant opportunity!