Take Me to the River
Aboard the Glastonbury-Rocky Hill Ferry

Story by Colleen Fitzpatrick | Photography by Jack McConnell

When Captain Larry Stokes fires up the diesel engine of the tugboat Cumberland each May and chugs away from the pilings, he is continuing a tradition that dates to the mid-17th century: the running of the ferry across the Connecticut River between Glastonbury and Rocky Hill.

Billed as the oldest continuously operating ferry in the country, the Rocky Hill-Glastonbury ferry these days is less of a transport for farm animals and produce (although its farm roots are still in evidence) and more of a commuter, tourist, and scenic attraction, operating from May through October each year.

It also is a harbinger of summer, as ferry-riders conjure bicycle rides along bucolic roads, baskets full of freshly picked berries, and satisfying eats, whether from a picnic savored on the grassy banks of the Glastonbury side or a burger or dog devoured under a Mitchell’s on the River umbrella on the Rocky Hill side.

On an overcast day in May, a cool, thin rain falls on and off. Travelers are few but enthusiastic. Stokes, dressed in a khaki shirt and pants and black loafers, stays more or less dry in the tug wheelhouse, which is just big enough to accommodate him and a guest. He receives fond greetings from passengers who haven’t seen him in six months.

“Did you have a nice winter?” a driver calls from her car on the small barge, which is lashed to the tug.

“I would rather have been here,” Stokes replies.

Like the woman bantering with the pilot, most people board the ferry with wide smiles on their faces. The reason

for that is simple: “People come here because they want to,” Stokes says.

In Colonial times, ferrying across the river was more a matter of necessity than desire. In the absence of bridges spanning the Connecticut, farmers relied on makeshift ferry service up and down the waterway to usher themselves and their cows, horses, sheep, and pigs to the opposite banks. Once the bridges came, the ferries went. Only one other Connecticut River ferry survives in the state today: the Chester-Hadlyme ferry.

The Rocky Hill-Glastonbury service (residents on the river’s east side invert the town names, calling it the Glastonbury-Rocky Hill ferry) took hold soon after 1649. Both villages were still part of Wethersfield, and residents that year voted to lay roads on either side of the river – present-day Route 160, also known on the east as Ferry Lane and on the west as Glastonbury Road. A public landing was established in Rocky Hill.

The first ferrymen came from the family of Joseph Smith, who held an early land grant in Rocky Hill. The Connecticut General Assembly formally granted the ferry right to Smith’s son Jonathan in 1724 and set the toll: “four pence for each man, horse, and load, with persons on horseback at half rate, double on Sundays or during high water,” according to Glastonbury’s successful application for a national historic district that includes the ferry. Today, the ferry costs $3 per car (passengers included), $2 for motorist-commuters using a coupon book, and $1 per “walk-on.”

When the Connecticut Valley Railroad came through Rocky Hill Landing in 1871, the ferry became an important link in a wider inland transportation network. Railroads continued to bypass the east side of the river, so well into the 20th century, Glastonbury’s merchants ferried woolen goods and ground feldspar to the rail yards.

The earliest ferries likely were rafts or canoes. They were supplanted by vessels propelled by oars, poles, or sails, depending on river conditions, which could be severe. During flooding, ferrymen skidded their boats across marshes to alternate landings.

In 1846, a ferryman installed a horse-powered treadmill on the deck of his flatboat. Some 30 years later, the crafts were upgraded to steam-driven (the first such vessel was named Centennial) after Rocky Hill and Glastonbury paid $1,000 to Lyman Williams for that purpose. Williams’ partner, Martin F. Hollister, the son of a South Glastonbury judge, eventually became the sole owner of the ferry privilege; he built and launched a steam-powered vessel in 1888 called The Hollister.

His tenure came to an end five years later following a legal challenge in which the state Supreme Court ruled that the towns owned the ferry. They operated it jointly until the state took it over in 1915.

The ghosts of other ferrymen past haunt the area and are resurrected when descendants speak their names to Stokes: Bulkeley, Tryon, Platt, Lawson, Hale, Baker ...

Who rides the ferry these days? Plenty of people – 46,161 passengers and 20,162 vehicles during the 2007 season, says Kevin Nursik, a spokesman with the Connecticut Department of Transportation, which operates the ferry.

Stokes elaborates: You’ve got your commuters (“It’s a nice way to begin a day; it’s a soothing way to go home.”), and your bicyclists (“Sometimes we get more than 100 bikers a day. They ride from Rocky Hill to Glastonbury to the shore.”), and your Europeans (“A lot of Europeans, they fly in to Boston, rent a car, tour the country on the back roads, not the highways. They know how to do it right, and plus, the Europeans are into ferries.”).

He continues: You’ve got farmers who cart their produce to the market and non-farmers who enjoy picking berries in Glastonbury’s fertile fields (“People give me free berries.”). And you’ve got schoolchildren, who, in Stokes’ book, trump all the other categories. “This place is about kids. The ferry preserves a historical site for children so they can know their local history.”

You’ve also got errand-runners such as Sharon Perkins of Wethersfield, who earlier in the day caught the ferry from Rocky Hill to check on a friend’s chickens in Glastonbury and now is returning home. With her is a friend, Nancy Schneider, visiting from Delray Beach, Florida.

“You know how fun this is?” exclaims Perkins, cozy inside her Scion xB. “Look at us. We’re able to interact with one another and use our time in no way other than in the enjoyment of each other’s company.”

Adds Schneider, “There’s no road rage.”

Mate Bob Nogas, whose yellow waders brighten up the gray day, has guided Perkins’ car and two others – maximum vehicle capacity is three – onto the barge, The Hollister III. Stokes leaves his wheelhouse, walks to the tugboat’s stern and unhitches a line that keeps the tug snug against the barge. Nogas does the same with the bow line, reattaching it at the side-center of the barge so the tug can reverse direction and become realigned again with the barge. Stokes takes the wheel in his right hand, the throttle in his left, and pulls the barge as he draws away from the pilings.

The ferry travels in an arc across the river, mainly because of the current, which on this day is running at about one knot. Navigation also is complicated by the tides; even at a distance of 15 to 20 miles from the mouth of the Connecticut River, tides can cause the depth to vary by more than two feet. Traveling at a speed of three knots, the ferry completes its crossing in four minutes.

“You have to approach the landing on an angle, with the barge on the hip like this,” says Stokes, formerly of the U.S. Merchant Marine, who took up his ferry captain’s commission in 1992. “This is called ‘towing a passenger barge on the hip.’”

Does the job get boring?

“No, it’s not boring. You have to keep concentration to do this,” he says.

The regulars on the river, besides a high-school crew team

or two at this time of year, include a great blue heron and a beaver that Stokes swears is five feet long. Eagles soar over the waterway in autumn, while all kinds of river dwellers – eel, catfish, striped bass – cut through the current. “I had a seal up here once,” he says.

How about pirates?

“We are pirates,” Stokes says, chuckling.

Nogas, the deckhand, jokes, “As part of our initiation, they do a background check. They said to me, ‘You’ve got just about every charge there is against you – you warrant a commission.’ “

In winter, when the ferry sits at the Essex Boat Works, Stokes cleans, scrapes, and paints the bilges of the black-and-red, steel-hulled, 28-foot tug, built in 1955 by Blount Marine Corp. of Warren, R.I., at a cost of $28,000. “Now, you couldn’t even get the engine for that. One of these [tugs] today would cost more than $200,000, so the state made a good investment,” he says. “It’s a beautifully designed hull, a really nice boat.”

The boat was designed by naval architect Walter McInnis, founder of the design and brokerage firm of Eldredge-McInnis of Boston and perhaps best known for his 1930 design of the 52-foot yacht Marlin, which President John F. Kennedy would eventually buy for his family’s use.

From a distance or up close, the ferry captivates. Perhaps it is its small size, the little flatboat and its little gate and gangplank. Or the way the lines that hitch barge and tug together, rather

than being the size of a bodybuilder’s bicep, could fit nicely in a hand. There is something delightful about the diminutive. The craft is manageable and intimate, not cavernous like the Cross Sound Ferry out of New London.

Yet the small ferry offers an escape, a promise of a voyage, that is just as grand – or grander.

“My little sister was right – it does feel like we’re in England!” cries Emily Berger, 11, to her friend Dina Bassette, 9, as they float toward Rocky Hill, enroute to their tutoring lessons in New Britain.

The Bassette clan frequently rides the ferry. Dina’s mother, Chris Bassette, who helps farm 85 acres north of the Glastonbury ferry landing, drives a 10-foot box truck onto the ferry three days a week in season to sell fruit, vegetables, and homemade jams at farmers’ markets on the river’s west side. She welcomes the peacefulness of the ride, the chance to sit back and collect herself, even if only for four minutes.

Traveling by ferry “does remind you of an older time, of a time way back when this is how they did it,” she says. “It almost makes you relive history. It almost gives you a piece of history.”

As Bassette drives off the barge toward solid Rocky Hill ground, she and the girls call or wave goodbye to the captain and mate.

Across the Connecticut goes the ferry. Back it comes. Across and back. A 360-year tradition continues; the rhythm of riding the river has begun again.

Colleen Fitzpatrick is a freelance writer who lives in Simsbury.