In the photo that appears both up top and nearby here the steamboat Emma Giles is arriving at the Tolchester Beach Resort on Maryland’s Upper Eastern Shore. It’s a summer day in 1936. She is at the end of the line when it comes to her passenger-service days–this is the closing stretch of a long, storied career.
In her prime, the gorgeous sidewheeler made steamboat aficionados go weak at the knees. She launched in 1887 and sailed the Bay for nearly half a century. Here is the writer David C. Holly who penned a wonderful book-length biography of Emma Giles:
“Because of her endurance–and forbearance under adversity–she seemed in a way to symbolize much that happened to the steamboat industry: its rise and fall, its triumphs and tribulations, the dreams, ambitions, decisions, and mistakes of its leaders, its pageantry and its pain. … She earned the affection [of the traveling public] that followed her down through the years.”
It’s a little hard to make out in this photo, but the vessel’s foredeck has been cut back by now to make room for cars and trucks that didn’t exist when she was young. The wheelhouse has been moved farther back. By this point, she has lost a good measure of grace and beauty compared with her glorious youth.
The steamboat industry began to decline around World War I, losing ground to cars and trucks on highways as well as to trains. There were nearly 50 steamers working the Bay at the start of World War I. That number sank to fourteen by the late 1930s, the time of this photo.
In that book, Steamboat on the Chesapeake, Mr. Holly reports that 1936 was a dismal year in the long life of Emma Giles:
Post card showing Emma Giles in her prime
She “shuttled back and forth to Tolchester in obedience to a … company that was trying desperately to win some of the ferry trade. … The venture failed. Most often, Emma Giles sailed with few, if any, vehicles and precious little cargo. … The spectacle of Emma Giles bravely sailing forth carrying little or nothing was sad indeed. Pathetic, too, and poignant, was the small gesture of lengthening the time for her run to Tolchester by twenty minutes … to permit a few more sales at the concession stand.”
Emma Giles made her last voyage as a steamship in November 1936. She was then ripped up and converted into a flat barge. She didn’t sail on her own power anymore. For another decade or so, she would be towed between Baltimore and North Carolina, her job now that of a waterborne pack mule.
Yet Emma Giles still made the best of it! Her tow-boat captain in those barge years, Charles Curlett, ran several other vessels, but described Emma as his favorite.
“She can carry the most lumber with the lightest draft of any barge that moves through the inland waterways,” he said.
Emma Giles was eventually left to rot on the outskirts of a shipyard near Baltimore. The last crumbling remnants of her were turned to scrap metal in June 1959 by construction crews working on a bridge project. If you ever find yourself crossing Curtis Creek along Pennington Avenue in South Baltimore, give a though to Emma Giles: May she rest in peace.
–posted in April 2026 by Jim Duffy for Secrets of the Eastern Shore/Whimbrel Creations LLC. All rights reserved.
AFTERNOTES:
• Do you want to know what it was like to ride Emma Giles in her glory days? Hop aboard here.
• Mr. Holly’s book tells the whole story of the steamboat era through the lens of this one vessel. It’s available in many good used bookstores in our area. Online information here:
https://amzn.to/2BVWvYA
• The photo of Emma Giles at Tolchester appears in Mr. Holly’s book. It is in the collection of the Steamship Historical Society. The other image here in an old postcard I came across online.
