Twilight on the Bay: The Excursion Boat Empire of B.B. Wills Book

Twilight on the Bay tells the story of one man's effort to sail against the tide. In 1934 when Benjamin Bowling Wills purchased a fifty-year-old Hudson River steamboat to bring passengers to an amusement park he owned on the Potomac River south of Washington, D.C., even he didn't realize that he would soon abandon the amusement park and spend the next thirty-odd years running excursion boats in Washington...and Baltimore...and Boston...and even in Houston, Texas. As a viable element in the U.S. transportation system, excursion boats were rapidly becoming passe when Wills came on the scene. Many companies failed to survive the economically stressful days of the Great Depression. But that was precisely when Wills began to expand his holdings and move into new markets. Twilight on the Bay describes this unusual development in exquisite detail. Relying on the private papers and correspondence of B. B. Wills himself, the author traces the evolution of Wills's empire from the Potomac River on to the Chesapeake Bay - and eventually to cities up and down the east coast.