Praam

A ship with a sad face.

For hundreds of years the Overijssel pram was the ship for carrying peat from the provinces Drente and Overijssel to Holland and to the brickyards along the big rivers. Around the year 1890 there must have been about 700 of these kind of ships in the Netherlands. Their dimensions were usually 21,5 x 4,5 meters and their loading capacity 100 to 120 tons. Later some of these ships provided a small accommodation on deck, which could be removed when deck cargo had to be loaded. The ship had a small bottom, the sides pointed outwards. The appearance of the hull gave the ship a rather sad face.
The extraction of peat came to an end when, around World War 1, coal production started in the province of Limburg. With the decline of peat extraction, these big prams disappeared.