Bay Ferries and Excursions

The Bay Ferries and Excursions inventory endeavors to illuminate the long and rich history of local maritime transportation that Escambia County relied on from the 1820s to 1930s to connect with the immediate area around it. This landscape captured forty-two sites, including historical ferry services, the excursion boats that visited Santa Rosa Island, excursion destinations, early beach resorts, and the wharves where excursion boats docked and launched. However, this inventory depicts only a fraction of the excursion destinations and the boats that facilitated access across the bays. Nonetheless, these inventoried sites detail the significant history how local maritime transportation prospered for a little over one hundred years in Escambia County.

Pensacola and Escambia bays form a natural barrier between Escambia and Santa Rosa counties. Starting around the early 1820s, ferryboats offered the only means of regularly-scheduled access across the bays. By the 1920s, two prominent ferry services competed and provided a doorway between the two counties. With the completion of modern infrastructure across Escambia’s bay and river in 1926, traditional ferry services in Escambia Bay ceased operations. However, a proposed ferry service is planned to help provide access to the Gulf Islands National Seashore from downtown Pensacola. The road connecting the park to Pensacola Beach is highly susceptible to washouts from flooding, rising tides, and storm surges, costing millions to constantly reroute and repair. Furthermore, the frequency of severe weather patterns in Escambia County continues to escalate. Examining Escambia County’s historical ferry services may help promote the incoming ferry service.

Accompanying the traditional ferries, excursion boats transported locals and tourists to points of interest along the bays. Around the 1880s, the recreational significance of Santa Rosa Island grew, creating a demand for access to the island for leisure purposes. The demand sparked a surge of private businesses specializing in small and large ships that provided access to the island. Numerous excursion boats launched from Palafox Wharf and other nearby berths to enable access to the island’s valuable and desirable recreational resources. These boats and businesses ushered in the start of a new tourist-based era of commerce. In 1931, newly-constructed bridges opened across Pensacola Bay and Santa Rosa Sound, offering people direct land access to Santa Rosa Island. Soon after, the maritime transportation excursion services disappeared from Pensacola’s waterfront. Exploring the excursion boat landscape reveals a bygone and nearly forgotten era of Escambia County’s maritime and cultural heritage.

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