For most of its history, the wharf was a major part of the economic lifeline linking Centreville with the wider world, and it was also a place of adventure and community life shaped by water, sand, ships, and social activity. Among its notable events was a 1912 hydro-aeroplane landing, when two U.S. Navy lieutenants flew from Annapolis in 31 minutes on a Saturday morning, were met at the wharf, taken into Centreville for lunch, and returned to Annapolis at 4:30 that afternoon, in a spectacle described by the Centreville Observer as the craft came up the Corsica like a huge bird following the winding river. The wharf also hosted the schooner The Australia, which had been built in New York in 1862 as Ella Alida, served as the blockade runner Alma out of the Bahamas during the Civil War, was captured by the U.S. Navy, sold at auction, purchased by Hiram Dudley of Queenstown, and renamed; it then operated on the Chesapeake Bay for 60 years before being donated by the DuPont family in 1951 to Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut. The Frampton family organized much of the recreation at the wharf, whose white sands before Mill Stream's upstream development made it a popular meeting place, with Captain Ozmon's granaries, warehouse sheds, and schooner nearby, along with the sheds of the Langrall Fruit Packing plant. The wharf was also tied to seafood shipments to Baltimore and beyond, local seafood supply, steamboat arrivals that drew dressed-up crowds to greet passengers, and the floating theater that for a time in the early 1900s was one of Centreville's main social events.