The Nantasket Steamboat

in the Wharf District

(awaiting installation)

The S.S. Nantasket was one of a fleet of wooden paddle-wheel steamboats that plied between Rowes Wharf and Nantasket. Built in Chelsea, it could carry 2,000 passengers.

Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection

For more than 150 years, Rowes Wharf has been the departure point for boats heading across Boston harbor to towns on the South Shore.  Generations of Bostonians have closely associated Rowes Wharf with the boat to Nantasket. Eager to escape the city’s summer heat, they arrived here by horse cars, carriages, trolleys, or walked from South Station.

The 90-minute, 15-mile cruise on steam-powered paddle-wheelers glided passengers past the harbor islands to Nantasket’s four miles of sand, its ornate Gilded Age hotels, and later its beloved amusement park that stood between the steamboat landing and the beach.

“We took the Nantasket boat every summer,” one Bostonian recalls. “My grandmother packed a huge lunch for us. Late afternoon, we climbed back onto the boat, sunburned and happy, and slept most of the way home.”

By the 1960s, the sidewheelers gave way to diesel-powered commuter boats and dinner cruises, even as the old wooden passenger sheds were replaced by an elegant new Rowes Wharf.

Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum

Posters chronicle the history of Rowes Wharf, including one that shows a cluster of steamboats preparing for excursions to Nantasket and Plymouth.

Davidson College Archive

The neck of land the Wampanoags called Nantascot was a major summer resort. Grand hotels with dance floors and casinos were built there starting in 1854. Enrico Caruso once performed at The Atlantic House, on the hill with three towers.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

When Paragon Park opened in 1905, it boasted a Japanese village, camel rides, a lagoon and sideshows. As tastes changed,  a roller coaster, bumper cars and a carousel were introduced. Though the park closed in 1985, the carousel with its hand-carved flying horses was saved and still whirls nearby.

Courtesy of Boston Public Library

Sign Location

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Community activists. Colonial law. Political will. New state regulations. The combination created the 43-mile Boston Harborwalk–a public path, stretching from Logan Airport through seven neighborhoods to the Neponset River. In 1978, the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (CZM) sought to improve public access to the waterfront. They succeeded by integrating early Colonial laws into new state regulations.

In the decades that followed, community activists, city and state government, and developers of shoreline projects have worked together to ensure the Harborwalk is always constructed along the waterfront. Some sites also provide public amenities–bathrooms, meeting places, kayak launches,
etc. The result is a fabulous path welcoming residents and visitors to our vibrant clean harbor.

Early Colonial laws established public right of access along tidelands to protect citizens' rights to fish, hunt, and navigate at sea and along the shorefront. These laws go back even further: They stem from Roman law, which was incorporated into English law and brought over to Massachusetts by English
settlers. Then, in the 1640s, Massachusetts Bay Colony passed laws permitting private docks in the intertidal area (between low and high tide) as long as public access was retained. Almost all of Boston's waterfront is filled land that was once the intertidal area. This, together with the centuries-old legal right of access, served as the underpinnings for the 1978 CZM regulations.

Resources

  • Advertisement for boats to Nantasket, Boston Evening Transcript, August 31, 1881.
  • Barr’s Postcard Journal, William and Elaine Pepe, September 2017.
  • Boston Globe, Johana Seltz, December 10, 2009.
  • Bradlee, Francis Boardman Crowninshield, Some Account of Steam Navigation in New England,1923.
  • Building Provincetown, David W. Dunlap, 31 December 2009.
  • Bunting, W.H. Portrait of a Port: Boston, 1852-1914. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1971.
  • Del Ponte, Jimmy. “Paragon Park,” The Somerville Times, May 14, 2020.
  • Harden, Chris, The History of Paragon Park, self-published 2021.

Acknowledgments