Definition
The toll, fare, or price paid for the transportation of persons and property across a ferry. More precisely, ferriage is the charge fixed by law or lawful authority for carrying the traveling public — together with such goods and chattels as they may carry — across a river, bay, or lake by ferry. It is not merely a contractual price between a private operator and a passenger, but a legally regulated charge attached to the exercise of a ferry franchise, which is itself a public franchise granted by government authority.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Transportation by ferry; also, the fee paid for a ferry ride.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The price or fare to be paid for passage at a ferry."
The common and legal meanings are close, but the legal concept carries a regulatory dimension absent from ordinary usage. In law, ferriage is not simply what a ferry operator chooses to charge — it is a toll whose rate is subject to legal limitation and public oversight, arising from the franchise nature of ferry operation. A researcher who treats ferriage as a purely commercial fare will miss its character as a regulated public charge.
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Why It Matters in Research
Ferriage appears most frequently in two distinct research contexts: ferry franchise litigation and toll regulation disputes, particularly from the early nineteenth through early twentieth centuries, when ferries were primary means of crossing navigable waterways before bridge construction became widespread.
Because a ferry franchise was a grant of exclusive public privilege, ferriage rates were treated as matters of public law, not merely private contract. Courts examined whether a ferry operator had charged excessive ferriage, whether statutory rate schedules were binding, and whether the franchise itself had lapsed or been forfeited. Researchers encountering ferriage disputes should expect to find the term embedded in broader franchise law, riparian rights, and state police power discussions.
In historical sources, ferriage is occasionally used loosely to mean the ferry service itself rather than strictly the toll — context will usually clarify, but flag this ambiguity when reading older pleadings or legislative records. Statutes regulating ferriage rates were common at the state level from the colonial period onward and were frequently codified in general transportation or roads-and-bridges provisions; searching for the term in isolation from its statutory context will produce incomplete results.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry in the source corpus is misdirected — the text supplied concerns feoffment to uses, not ferriage — and should be disregarded as a source-entry error. Do not rely on Rapalje & Lawrence for ferriage doctrine.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in full agreement: ferriage is the toll or fare paid for ferry transportation, with the legal precision that it is a price fixed by law for the traveling public, not merely a negotiated charge. Both editions of Black's reference People v. San Francisco & Alameda Railroad Co., 35 Cal. 606, which remains the cited authority for this definition in the primary dictionaries.
The historical dictionaries treat ferriage as a term of settled meaning requiring little elaboration, reflecting its relatively narrow and stable legal function. None of the historical sources discuss ferriage in connection with admiralty jurisdiction or maritime law, though ferry crossings of navigable waters could, in some circumstances, implicate federal authority — a dimension the dictionaries do not develop and which a researcher should independently consider depending on the waterway involved.
Webster's 1913 tracks the legal definition closely, which is consistent with ferriage having been a term of common practical understanding during the era when ferry crossings were everyday commerce.
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Jurisdictional Note
Ferriage rates were historically regulated by individual state legislatures, and rate schedules varied considerably across states and territories. Some jurisdictions fixed rates by statute; others delegated rate-setting to county or local authorities. Researchers working in a specific state should locate the applicable ferry franchise statute or local ordinance rather than assuming a uniform national standard.
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