Steering is a former river port in the salt- and freshwater marshes inland from Great Bay, whose changing fortunes follow the silting of the Steering River. First called The Meadows, the town depended on its waterway for shipbuilding and trade before the river’s decline redirected the local economy toward mills. It is also the setting of Steering School, an academy whose foundation is tied to Everett Steering’s recognition that the port could not last.

Setting and origins

The settlement lay only a few miles inland from Great Bay, in marsh and meadow country. It had no proper name at first and was known as The Meadows. Because boats and other business came up the river from the sea, the village served as a backup port to Great Bay, and families relied on shipbuilding or on commerce linked to the waterway.

After the Revolutionary War, enthusiasm for the town’s independence gave it the name Steering. The river, previously called Great River, was renamed the Steering River. The civic identity thus arose alongside the waterway that had made the settlement viable, even as the river was already beginning to fail as a route to the sea.

Everett Steering and the academy

Everett Steering, a shipbuilder, organized the installation of mounted cannons at strategic points along the river shore. They were intended to discourage a British attack expected to sail inland from the sea at Great Bay, but that attack never came. The cannons mark a period when the river was viewed as both the town’s connection to the wider world and a possible avenue of invasion.

Everett also recognized that the river was choking with silt. He warned his family that Steering would not remain a port for long unless people maintained it as one and dug a deeper channel. Without that work, he believed the rising mud would eventually make even a rowboat’s passage to Great Bay difficult except at very high tide. His practical understanding of the water’s future helped shape the decision to establish an academy.

In 1781, Everett’s widow and children founded Steering Academy, later associated with Steering School. The foundation answered Everett’s stated disappointment that he had not provided his boys with an academy capable of preparing them for higher education. His wish expressly concerned his sons, not his daughters, preserving the gendered limits of the educational ambition even as the school became a durable institution. Everett died of apoplexy on the same Christmas day that he had joined his children in a snowball fight; he was seventy-two, and they were already too old for such games.

From port to mills

The river’s decline did not affect every family in the same way. In the following century, the Steering family shifted its economic base by constructing textile mills across the waterfall on the freshwater part of the river. By the Civil War, the Steering Mills were the town’s only business. The family had moved from boats to textiles at the right time, adapting its livelihood to the changing use of the river.

Another shipbuilding family was less fortunate. Its last ship made it only halfway from Steering to the sea before settling permanently into the mud at The Gut, a once-notorious stretch of the river. For years the wreck could be seen from the road, partly afloat at high tide and entirely dry at low tide. Children played in it until it tipped onto its side and crushed someone’s dog; later, a pig farmer named Gilmore salvaged its masts to raise his barn. The wreck turns the river’s gradual silting into a visible record of a trade stranded by its own route.

By the time Garp attended Steering, the varsity crew could row its shells on the river only at high tide. At low tide, the Steering River was a wet mudflat all the way from town to the sea. The contrast between the academy’s flourishing and the diminished waterway is central to the place’s history: Steering’s institutions endure, while the port that first supported the town becomes nearly unusable.

The town in Garp’s time

Steering remains a setting for education, work, and family life in Garp’s story. His father-in-law, Ernie Holm, lives there and refinishes wrestling mats as a modestly profitable hobby. Garp passes over Ernie’s listing in the telephone directory without recognizing his name, a small moment in which the town’s familiar people and trades appear among the ordinary details of its local economy.

Garp and Ernie share an annual winter trip from Steering to Iowa to see a major wrestling match. For Ernie, who has shown early signs of heart trouble, life in the town is nevertheless a source of happiness. Steering is therefore more than the historical setting of an abandoned port: it is also the settled home from which recurring family routines depart and to which the novel’s local relationships remain anchored.

Literary significance

Steering’s history is told through the interaction of human decisions and a resistant landscape. Everett’s foresight does not stop the river from silting, but it helps redirect the community toward education; the mill builders likewise respond to the changed river by using its waterfall for textile production. The abandoned ship at The Gut offers the opposite outcome, its hull trapped in mud and its masts repurposed for a barn. Together, these details make the river both an economic force and a measure of how successfully families adapt to change.

Garp later turns the Steering family’s history into a joke about inherited “water instincts.” He writes that those instincts have weakened by the time they reach Midge Steering Percy, whose attraction to Hawaii and then to the United States Navy, in the form of Fat Stew, he treats as an ironic failure of the family’s old water sense. The joke extends the town’s founding story into a comic family legend: Steering’s identity begins with clear-eyed knowledge of water, while later generations become the occasion for teasing about how poorly that knowledge can survive inheritance.