Skip to main content

Floating Palaces

March 2023
1min read

This wonderfully entertaining account of the most remarkable of all coastal steamboat lines was first published in 1937, the year in which the line, then 91, suddenly stopped running. Now Mr. McAdam, unofficial historian of the Fall River Line, has revised and enlarged the rare early edition. There are many more pictures and the narrative has been brought down to the present, all with charm and authority. The story of other Long Island Sound operations is included, together with the eventual fate of all the old floating palaces themselves. Some puffed on a few more years in other waters, others went with unseemly haste to the scrap yards (lest the courts change their minds and order resumption of service), a few perished gloriously in World War II.

No tale is more astonishing, certainly, than that of the “honeymoon convoy,” eight old coastal steamers lend-leased to Britain and intercepted by a wolf pack of U-boats on their way to the British Isles. The former Eastern Steamship liners Boston and New York went down, while an old Martha’s Vineyard steamer, the New Bedford , picked up survivors. Afterward Dr. Goebbels paid them the greatest compliment of their lives by announcing over the radio that Nazi torpedoes had sunk “three superliners of the Queen Mary class.”

Priscilla, Commonwealth, Plymouth, Providence —readers will recall a color portfolio of them in the December, 1954, issue of this magazine—were indeed queens of their kind. Big, fast and sumptuous, they and their sisters provided for generations the preferred means of travel between New York and lower New England. Rail and automobile competition at length made their inroads, but the lines were still popular when a sit-down strike halted the enormous Commonwealth one June night in 1937 just as the whistle was blowing and the stewards were calling “All ashore that’s going ashore.” The 900 disappointed passengers who grumpily climbed off had unwittingly seen the end, for the railroad which owned the line leaped at this union-made opportunity to end the service. From the sweaty vantage point of 1955, the traveler fighting for a seat on the railroad diner (when there is one) or inching his way down the clogged and steaming “parkway” may well think back nostalgically to the old Sound steamers and all the sights of the blue water slipping by as one sat, unhurried, dining by the window. If it were running today, the Fall River Line would be making a fortune.

The Old Fall River Line , by Roger Williams McAdam. 288 pp. The Stephen Daye Press. $5.

Oliver Jensen

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "August 1955"

Authored by: Ruth Painter Randall

New light on the tragic case of a President’s widow who saw her own son as a hated enemy

Authored by: The Editors

Newspaper ads from occupied New York illumine Revolutionary War loyalties

Authored by: Louis Morton

Military science was very rigid in the 1600’s. It quickly changed when Americans began to fight Indians

Authored by: Bernard A. Weisberger

Calling millions to repentance, Moody and Sankey devised a new method of spreading the gospel

Authored by: The Editors

Never before printed, the headquarters record of the British conqueror of New York illuminates crucial events of the American Revolution.

Authored by: Victor W. Von Hagen

Some men see the beginnings. The conquistador who first saw the Mississippi also took the Inca highway to fabulous Cuzco.

Authored by: Daniel O’flaherty

Not until the Civil War was about over did the U.S. Navy manage to put a halt to the South’s imports

Authored by: William Brandon

The imagined liberty of Rousseau’s primitive individual was actually attained by the free trappers who helped America gain a continent

Authored by: Rudolph Marx, M.d.

Stalwart as he was, the general was often ill. A doctor studies his record and notes shortcomings in Eighteenth-Century medical care.

Authored by: Ruth B. Davidson

Distant lands supplied patriotic tableware to the new Republic

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

Often thought to have been a weak President, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or political fallout.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.