Jim Bradshaw: A dime once bought a ride across Berwick Bay

A sketch that appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1866 shows what may have been the first ferry to cross Berwick Bay between Morgan City and Berwick, or at least one very much like it.

It shows what is essentially a flatboat being rowed by two men. The passengers are an elegantly dressed woman shading herself with a parasol as she sits in a two-wheeled cart, an unmounted man holding the reins of his saddled horse, and a single man holding what looks like a fishing pole.

There is no text other than a brief caption identifying the ferry, but there is a handwritten note in the Louisiana State Archives, also from 1866, that describes that ferry as “not quite as elegant a boat as the Galveston ferry or the Fulton ferry [in] New York but very useful and probably the counterpart of the boats used in New York fifty years ago.”

The ferry was probably privately owned and operated, but the government horned in soon after steamboats came to south Louisiana, and the police jury began to auction the rights to operate the ferry, and to dictate how it should be done.

For example, when the Police Jury advertised for renewal of the franchise in 1903, it specified that the ferry had to be “a double hull boat, each hull to be not less than sixty feet in length … with a space of ten feet between each hull.” An old post card from that time illustrates such a boat, with the hulls designed to carry the traffic and the engine and pilothouse spanning the ten feet between them.

The hulls had to be “spacious enough … for teams to drive off and on” and “equipped with sufficient boiler power to secure a speed of not less than eight miles per hour.”

Floating docks had to be built on each side of the bay for loading and unloading, “moored at sufficient depth of water to assure the floating of said dock at all stages of the tide.” The approach to the dock had to be 16 feet wide for vehicles with a separate five-foot-wide passenger walkway.  

All of it — boat, docks, walkways, waiting rooms — had to be built and maintained at the expense of the operator, and the boats had to make the crossing every half hour, seven days a week, from 5 in the morning to 7 at night.

For this privilege the operator could charge no more than a dime per crossing for a foot passenger, a quarter for “each single horse, buggy, go cart, jumper, or automobile,” 40 cents for two-horse buggies and 50 cents for a two-horse hearse.

A freight wagon pulled by a mule could cross for forty cents if it was empty, fifty if it was loaded. Four-mule cane wagons forked up sixty cents empty and eighty cents loaded.

Packages weighing less than 100 pounds could be “entrusted to the care of the ferry operator” for a nickel a package.

Those seem to be pretty good rates for that day and time, but it appears that there weren’t a lot of people who wanted the headache of keeping the ferries running.

There was only one bid in the 1903 auction. Messrs. Fortins and Toerner got the five-year contract for the grand sum of $2 per year.

It appears to have been a good deal. A few years later they sold the franchise, ferry, buildings, and approaches to Walter Gilmore for $4,900 (about $150,000 today).

Ferries continued to cross the bay until the first automobile bridge, named for governors Huey Long and O.K. Allen, was finished just before Christmas in 1933.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington, LA 70589.