Twilight on the Bay: The Excursion Boat Empire of B. B. Wills 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, Baltimore, Boston, and even Houston, Texas.
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.