It Started with a Steamboat

By Steven Harvey

• Language: English
• Publisher: Authors Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781643143316

Steven Harvey

Steven Harvey was born an army brat at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas in 1950. Son of Midwesterners he was educated in Florida and joined the Navy in 1969. It was during this time that he became a steam mechanic aboard the USS Forrestal. The author has a life long fascination with the history of why things work and how they have changed the world we live in. He is a history bug who has produced steamboat models for the Glenn Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport and the New York State Museum at Albany. Today Steven lives a few miles north of Benson, NC. Most of the steamboat drawings contained in this book were created by this author, mechanic and historian.

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Copyright © 2020 by Steven Harvey

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Contents

Introduction

THE FULTON LEGACY

Chapter One

THE EARLY YEARS

Chapter Two

THE GREAT RACE

Chapter Three

BOOM OR BUST!

Chapter Four

BOATS AND THEIR BUILDERS

Chapter Five

THE POST WAR YEARS

Chapter Six

THE EXCURSIONIST

Chapter Seven

MONOPOLY

Chapter Eight

THE NINE YEAR WAR

Chapter Nine

THE THREE SISTERS

Chapter Ten

THE GOLDEN WAVE

Chapter Eleven

THE LAST DANCE

Chapter Twelve:

THE EAGLE AND THE AIRSHIP

Introduction

THE FULTON LEGACY

In little over a hundred years America went from a country of three million that lacked a national road system to become a world leader in all forms of fast transportation. It was during those formative years from 1807 to 1909 that the foundations of our cheap fast transportation system were laid forever changing us as a people and a nation. Gone are the days when our ancestors lived their entire lives never going more than fifty miles from home.

It all started with Robert Fulton’s steamboat trip up the Hudson River which brought about a mechanical transportation revolution that came ashore on iron rails and finally leaped into the air on the wings of the first airplanes. Our world has remained in constant motion ever since as America’s obsession with time and speed keeps moving on. As a people we spend an unbelievable amount of time watching races, fixing up cars and jazzing up motorcycles all in the name of speed.

The world in 1800 moved at a speed of about three miles an hour as foot power and shoe leather was the standard means to daily transport for the masses. Fulton’s steamboat changed all of that with an amazing speed to five miles an hour! With some fine tinkering his boat was traveling at a blazing eight miles an hour, nearly three times faster than foot power. Before long there were steamboats racing each other on the nation’s waterways traveling at over twenty miles an hour. By the end of the nineteenth century some express trains were clocked at over sixty miles per hour while experimenters worked on the first automobiles and airships. America’s economy has ever since been firmly based on having fast, cheap transportation. This all came about because Robert Fulton put a steam engine on a boat.

As a kid I always went for the rich slice of cake. You know the one that had the most icing and decoration on it. So when it came down to finding the richest slice of America to tell my story from I chose New York State and its fabulous Finger Lakes as ground zero for this amazing trip across time and space.

Our story is about how Robert Fulton’s Transportation Revolution swept into the western part of New York State and transformed everything it touched. In doing so it helped bring into being the modern world we now live in. The Fulton Revolution of using new technologies like canals and steam engines to speed up transportation and development worked something like this. Cheap fast transportation moving goods quickly to distant markets dropped prices, increased the movement of people and goods while speeding up development. The endless cycle of speed and development keeps the ball rolling as time and distance continues to shrink our ever changing world.

Here then is a part of this mad race against time and distance that few people have ever heard. It has to do with the early pioneer movement going west starting in the 1790’s and how the Finger Lakes of New York State became a national crossroads. How empires built on canals, steamboats and railroads in this region played a pivotal role in the opening of the Great American West and later helped win the Civil War.

Speed also changed our ancestor’s lives to the point that they needed to escape it as the Excursionist Age of lakeside resorts, fine wines and dance halls came to life for the working weary and the high rollers of post-Civil War America. Canandaigua, Keuka, Seneca and Cayuga Lakes were among the crown jewels of this age, having many great wineries along with some of the best railroads and steamboats in the land.

With the wealthy came steamboat wars, great estates and fast steam yachts as the money men of New York City, Rochester and Buffalo did everything in their power to buy control of these splendid lakes. Wars of trade and commerce were waged between different communities that wanted their share of the wealth. The story of how Elmira was always a step ahead of Ithaca and later took control of Seneca Lake steamboats from their Geneva owners is classic. Follow that with how Penn Yan and Hammondsport butted heads for the same trade on Keuka Lake as steamboat wars were all the rage. These are only a few of the stories covered here.

We also have local visionaries like Allen Wood, the Springsteads, Henry S. Stebbins and Timothy D. Wilcox. They all in turn helped to make and mold the people and events of the times. Out of all of this creative energy emerged the Wizard of Hammondsport, Glenn Curtiss. This was the local kid that lived through all of the above and went on to become the fastest man in the world on both land and in the air. He then went on to become America’s first great motorcycle champion, father of Naval Aviation and largest manufacture of airplanes in the world.

MY JOURNEY WRITING THIS BOOK

It has taken me over twenty years of collecting, conferring and research to put the pieces of this story together. The road of discovery that produced this volume had many guides along its way that I am extremely indebted to. I would like to thank Lindsley A. Dunn, the former curator of the Glenn Curtiss Museum for all of his help that started the ball rolling. The Staff of the Oliver House Museum in Penn Yan who back in 1985 spoke of the need for a book that cover the other lakes as well as Keuka. The late Eleanor Clise and her friends at the Geneva Historical Society including Archivist Karen Osborn who helped put together the rich history of Seneca Lake for me. Then we have Ontario County Archivist Mary Jo Lanpher, who helped provide the census material that filled in the many gaps in the Springstead family tree.

I want to give my heartfelt thanks to Don and Mary Quant of Port Byron, NY and their ongoing efforts to piece together the last remaining mysteries of the Finger Lakes by digging through countless newspapers and records of the nineteenth century.

Finally I would like to say to the late Jim Hope, former Steuben County Historian who started me down this path of discovery back in 1983, and It’s done! With the help of countless friends I have been able to bring back to life these dreamers, makers and shakers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, which made the world we now live in possible.

MOVING AMERICA

In 1807 Fulton made the first steamboat trip form New York City to Albany in thirty two hours. Glenn Curtiss, as part of the Hudson Fulton Celebration of 1910, flew his airplane from Albany to New York City having traveled the same distance as Fulton in only two hours and thirty three minutes. As New Yorker’s stood atop their buildings that day to cheer Curtiss as he passed overhead there was a moment of reflection to be made. Up above was the airplane, but looking down to the Hudson below them everyone could see the fleets of steamboats still in use. As one person put it, It started down there on the river with Fulton and now it’s flying over our heads with Curtiss. My! How time flies!

Two hundred years have passed and man has gone to the moon and back while others plan to go to Mars and beyond. As we look up to the stars we need to look back at our lakes and rivers and remember, IT STARTED WITH A STEAMBOAT.

Chapter One

THE EARLY YEARS

The Europeans had the technology to build steamboats for almost a century and did nothing with it. The reason was they didn’t have a need for them. Europe and England had plenty of good roads and harbors to handle their shipping needs. This old established transportation system had worked well for hundreds of years so why would anyone in their right mind want to change it. So this first mechanical transportation system would remain an ongoing science project that many would tinker with from time to time.

On the other side of the Atlantic things were different. America was a young nation that lacked roads or the money to build them. This new country was blessed with a natural system of inland rivers and lakes that were ready for use if only they had a quick way of moving people and goods on these water arteries. America was going to have a difficult time developing as a nation if it couldn’t find a new technology that would help it push inland into its western territory on these waterways. Here then is the story of how the experimental steamboats and canals produced by English and French engineers were fashioned into a practical working transportation system by Robert Fulton on this side of the Atlantic.

Going Nowhere

The newly formed United States of America was bursting at the seams with her teaming millions all located within a few miles of the Atlantic Seaboard. The barriers that stood in her way were a mixture of politics and geography. Spanish ownership of Florida and the great Louisiana Territory blocked expansion to the south and to the lands west of the Mississippi River. Mother Nature, not to be out done, had placed the Appalachian Mountains as a great wall running through Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Only one small crack in this mighty fortification known as the Cumberland Gap afforded enough room for small wagon trains to make the trek west, weather permitting. To compound this problem further the nation’s major waterways like the Atlantic Seaboard, Hudson, Delaware and Susquehanna rivers ran north and south. The only practical route around these obstacles to the Western Territory of the Ohio Valley lay across New York State. Millions of acres of cheap federal land were awaiting pioneer families that were brave enough to make their way to the nation’s Western Promised Land by this northern route.

Today most New Yorkers think of St. Louis, Missouri as the gateway to the west. Back in the 1790’s the trek west started at the doorstep of Albany, NY. Thousands of pioneers would embark on their journey west by sailing up the Hudson River to Albany. After getting outfitted with provisions and a good wagon they joined a train. The path they followed went through the old Indian lands of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Tuscarorans, Onondagas, Cayuga and Seneca nations, as they made their way west to the shore of Lake Erie. It was here that they built rafts and completed the journey using nature’s water highways. Down lakes they went turning into rivers and finally arriving in a valley or on a plane where they established a homestead. For every family that made it there were others that died in the untamed waters as the wreckage of their dreams floated ashore.

One thing that all of these early settlers faced were the lack of a good reliable transportation system to service their needs. As the lands between Albany and Lake Erie were bought up and the Ohio Valley filled up all of these new settlements cried out for a way to get their farm goods to markets in the east. If you had no one to sell your croups to you could lose your farm. The further west you lived the greater the problem was as farmers lost their homesteads for nonpayment of taxes or mortgage foreclosures. For many years these first settlers lived in a forest bound wilderness, cut off from the rest of the world.

With all of these difficulties to overcome why would anyone in their right mind want to move west? The simple answer to question was opportunity and ownership. If you could become the first blacksmith, store or public house owner in a new frontier town your opportunities to grow and prosper were almost unlimited. Western undeveloped land that houses, business and farms could be established on went for pennies on the dollar compared with what land sold for back east. The difference between boom and bust for these early pioneers was transportation to and from the great markets of the east.

The first attempts to remedy this situation started off with small armies of ax men trying to widen well-worn wilderness trails. This proved to be a slow expensive process. The Williamson Road was one of these glorified paths that inched its way from Pennsylvania to Col. Rochester’s small settlement on Lake Ontario throughout the 1790’s. The other well-trampled path was the one running from Albany to Canandaigua, which served as the unofficial capital of western New York.

The water routes used by the early settlers for shipping involved the daring use of small rivers like the Canisteo and Cohocton. In the early spring or late fall every year they briefly had enough water in them to float rafts of lumber and food down to the great Susquehanna River. From there they made the long journey south down to Baltimore, Maryland. Many an early settler was lost to this watery graveyard of raging waters or was robbed on the long walk back home. What solved this dilemma was a great deal of European science and American spunk.

Fulton’s Vision

The mighty Hudson River was a super highway of commerce with hundreds of sailboats and slow moving barges navigating her waters. Travel up the Hudson was an uphill battle run against a strong southern flowing current. The sailboat trip to Albany that took three days was swift compared with the seven day bumpy ride by stagecoach or the two week trek on foot. All of this would be forever changed by Robert Fulton’s return to America with two English steam engines.

From an early age Robert Fulton had displayed a talent for art and anything mechanical in nature. With the end of the Revolutionary War, Fulton finally had the opportunity of going to England to pursue a career in art. While there he discovered that an artist by day could be a well-paid draftsman by night. Britain at this time was a hot bed of new technologies being produced by its Industrial Revolution. This involved new ways of mining deep in the earth for coal and tin. By using the abundants of coal mass production of cheap goods could be made of durable iron. And to keep the mines dry large steam powered pumps had been developed. The steam engines developed for this task were the most advanced ones in the world at that time. So impressive were these power plants that inventers like Jonathan Hull drew up patents that show them being used on boats and other forms of transportation.

Fulton’s would-be career as an artist went from making paintings of ladies in small lockets that their suitors carried with them to that of a draftsman making illustrations of machines and canal equipment. It was around this time that he started writing papers about the advantages gained by building canal systems.¹ He was also learning everything he could about the efficient Watt’s steam engines being produced by the firm of Boulton & Watt. Writing them letters as well as visiting their plant.² He also had many friends who were canal builders that he helped by inventing new ways of moving barges on these man-made rivers of commerce. In time he was convinced that a canal system like the one being built England could one day help solve many of the problems back home. If America could be united with a canal system connecting the major lakes and rivers into a national transportation system with boats powered by steam as shown in the Jonathan Hall paten of 1737 marvelous things could happen in America. The steam engine by this time had dropped in weight to the point that it might one day be mounted on a well-built boat.

In 1802 Fulton moved to France and became a good friend of the U. S. Minister to France, Robert R. Livingston. Fulton and Livingston were almost like a father and son who were both passionately intrigued by the same things. The subject of steam power being applied to inland shipping was at the top of their list. All of those borrowed ideas they had been collecting from English and French engineers over the years were finally put together in a steamboat they built on the Seine River. After some major problems with the local shippers were solved and a few mechanical ones were ironed out their steamboat finally left her pier traveling at a humble four miles an hour. Their steamboat of 1803 was by no means the first such craft ever built, but it did act as a working model for what they wanted to bring to America’s waterways. One thing they both agree on was that a really successful boat needed the more powerful and reliable Watt steam engine. At this time England didn’t allow for the export of their highly prized technical master piece.

Fulton’s experiments brought him to the attention of the French Government who were extremely interested in his papers about underwater navigation in a boat he called a submarine. Before long he was building submarine mines and a real working submarine that he called the Nautilus with French grants. Napoleon Bonaparte, leader of France had a difficult time believing in Fulton’s inventiveness and kept putting off making a final commitment to fleets of steamboats and submarines. By the time he awoke to how brilliant it would be to sink England’s Navy with submarines and move his arm across the English Channel on a windless day with a fleet of steamboats Fulton was back in England.

It seems that while Napoleon was at a lost as to what to do, Fulton had grown tired of this game having broken up all of these inventions and selling the metal to a scrap dealer to raise money for his passage back to England. Now all of that wonderful technology paid for by the French would become the property of the Royal Navy as Fulton was paid for his knowledge. As part of the deal he was given the right to export two Watt steam engines to New York City where he and his partner Robert R. Livingston had agreed on as the place to build their steamboat at. So in 1806 Robert Fulton sailed home with a head full of knowledge and two of the finest steam engines in the world.

Fulton’s Folly

Almost twenty years before Fulton started building his steamboat a native born American genius John Fitch had built and operated a steamboat out of Philadelphia on the Delaware River. After years of failures, experimenting, engine and boat building Fitch finally produced a steamboat that cruised up and down the Delaware at a speed of over eight miles an hour.

The Congress of the United States was meeting at Philadelphia that year. Congressmen were seen watching Fitch and his steamboat do things that were impossible for sailing vessels to do and yet they never gave any government backing that was so badly needed at the time. The local owners of sailing craft spread stories of what would happen if the boiler bust and how sparks from the boat would set the waterfront on fire. As a result of these stories and lack of government backing no one was willing to ship cargo on her and would be passenger used sailboats. When the money to operate the steamboat ran out Fitch was ruined and the boat was scrapped.

Now it was up to Fulton and Livingston to make steamboat travel a reality on America’s waterways. By this time the progressive government of New York State was offering a steamboat shipping monopoly to the first ones to provide steamboat service on their waters. So the decision to build their boat in New York City was an easy one to make. With Livingston’s money Fulton created his own shipyard, machine shop and engine manufacturing plant. One of the Watt engines was carefully taken apart and a complete set of drawing were made so the engine could be reproduced. The other engine went into the new boat being built on New York’s waterfront.

As the boat progressed and the shops were being built the name of unlucky John Fitch was once again spoken of by the people of Philadelphia who were angry to see this project with all of its money going into the pockets of New Yorkers instead of theirs. It seems everyone but Fulton and Livingston knew that the best shipyards in America where in Philadelphia not New York City. For this and other reasons Philadelphia also being newspaper center of the country started bashing Fulton’s steamboat project taking shape in New York. By the time the boat was ready to sail the project was nationally known as Fulton’s Folly, thanks to the newspapers and the fools that read them.

On the day Fulton’s North River steamboat was to make its first trip from New York City to Albany, Robert Livingston, one of the richest men in America showed up with his entire family. He wanted to show every skeptic that the boat was safe and only a fool would not want to travel on such a craft as this. About thirty two hours later New Yorkers once again had a paddle wheel steamer smoking up their harbor as it made its way back to its home pier. A new age dawned that day and Robert Fulton was a national hero.

Fulton’s successful trips up and down the Hudson in 1807 cut the trip from New York to Albany to about a day. Fulton would go on to build a fleet of steamers each one being larger and faster than the one before it. He had revolutionized water travel in America by applying steam power to her busiest artery, the Hudson River. Fulton with Livingston’s support had created America’s first mechanical transportation industry with a fleet of steamboats and the facilities to build more.

With the conquest of the Hudson in hand there still remained the mighty Mississippi River in the nation’s heartland that needed steamboats. So in 1811 Fulton tackled this problem by building the river’s first steamer, the New Orleans. As steam power grew on the Mississippi so did the nation’s commerce. Fulton’s vision of a national transportation system of canals, steamboats and other forms of transportation now needed government help to help fund the digging and building of a canal system that would connect the Hudson with the Mississippi providing two different ways farmers in the heartland could ship their goods. One way would be down the Mississippi to New Orleans. The other would be east to New York City by way of the Great Lakes using a new canal that needed to be built.

At first Fulton had written letters to George Washington while he was in England to be told by the President that the government had no money for grand projects like canals. A stubborn Fulton never stopped writing his letters about building a national transportation system as Congressmen, Presidents and Governors agreed with him time after time only to end their letters with how canals cost money they don’t have.³ Fulton’s greatest canal project was all about digging a master canal across New York State that would join the Hudson and Lake Erie. One of his greatest converts was future Governor of New York, DeWitt Clinton. Fulton’s untimely death in 1815 put an end to the letters but not to his dream of uniting the waters of the east to those of the west.

Sixteen miles on the Erie Canal

Clinton’s ditch, as the Erie Canal was first called, really goes back to the first New Yorkers, the Dutch. These early settlers came from the most advanced canal and dike building nation in the world. The lower Hudson and Long Island were transformed from native wilderness into productive farms, villages and cities, protected by dikes, canals and windmills in only a few years. It was a piece of beautiful Holland that had been transplanted onto the shores of America by these hardworking men and women in their effort to establish a New Amsterdam.

Having grown up with an eye to the sea and a knack for trade, these Hollanders right from the start were building small boats to explore the local waterways and make friends with the many Native American Nations in their area. By building a trust between themselves and the native peoples of the land, their traders were allowed safe passage all of the way to the Great Lakes. It was only natural for these explorer-traders to marvel at these natural waterways and imagine putting it altogether like it was back in Holland. Many of these men knew the science of surveying and would at times take elevations and other measurements between different bodies of water. By the time the English took over New Amsterdam and renamed it New York, most of rivers, lakes and streams had been located with a good knowledge of what flowed where.

The English Lords saw promise in the idea of one day having a canal system for the shipping of goods and of travel into the interior of British North America. There was however one large overriding factor that couldn’t be overcome. The only way England could hold onto its North American Colonies was by having the Six Nations of the Iroquois on their side against the French in Canada. The Iroquois just happen to live on the very land that would make the best route for a canal. Any thought of building this waterway would have to wait for the British conquest of Canada and the rebellion of its thirteen colonies.

The birth of the United States and the fall of the great Iroquois Nation were still not enough to get a western canal started. What was also needed was money, lots of money. The new nation started off with no money and a large debt to England and France. Money to build much needed roads and canals didn’t exist. It would be thirty years before New York State with its own finances would build a great canal with no help from the Federal Government.

Clinton’s Ditch

The last two years of Robert Fulton’s life were spent in New York City building the world’s first steam powered warship to defend the city from the British. During this time Fulton used his talents on winning over powerful men with the idea that New York would greatly prosper if it built a canal from the Hudson to Lake Erie. With his steam powered warship almost completed and canal fever spreading across New York, Robert Fulton suddenly died. For years he had been burning his candle at both ends with too many projects and too little time for himself. The nation mourned the loss of its greatest inventor since Benjamin Franklin. Robert Fulton died in 1815, but his dreams and plans for moving America would live on.

Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York State would be the daring leader who by building his ditch from Albany to Lake Erie would transform New York City, New York State and America by opening the door to the great American West. In the year 1817, the four largest American seaports were Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New Orleans. New York City came in at a distant fifth place as a national shipping center. 1817 was also the year that the Erie Canal was approved of at a cost of seven million dollars for this man-made 425 mile long waterway.

Governor Clinton said the canal would prove to be the fastest way to develop the seven million acres of western New York and would act as a major conduit between Midwest and New York City. If he was on as right New York would become the richest state in the country. New York City would become the greatest port and the western part of the state would rapidly develop. If he was wrong, it would be seven million dollars down the drain in Clinton’s Ditch.

New York had boldly hitched its wagon to new forms of transportation as the foundation that its citizens could build profitable business on. If they were right New Yorkers would become the middle men of the nation controlling the flow of business across the land. The neighboring states and the federal government looked on as European canal builders took an interest in the new Yankee project.

In 1817, there were no steam shovels to move the earth with. It was now up to the sweat of thousands of men digging their four foot deep by forty feet wide trench through forest and fields of western New York. To house this great work force shanty town were thrown up by the workers and whiskey peddlers. Form these flimsy collections of shacks arose what in time what became a great belt of cities that cross the state marking the path of the great canal. Many of those who dug the canal and built its locks bought land along its path making a new life for themselves and their families. When they started digging the canal there were still North American Bison living in Buffalo, NY. By the time it was completed they were only a memory of what had been.

With the opening of the canal in 1825, everything changed. People going west by the thousands, became a flood of humanity that could not be numbered. The lands of the Midwest were quickly overrun as farms, towns and villages sprang from the prairie grass lands. Before long most of this territory was formed into new states that outnumbered the old ones.

Frontier New York gave way to the new wealth being generated by the super highway of the Erie Canal and the over 25,000 New Yorkers now living and working along its banks.⁴ In just a few short years New York City was shipping more cargo than all of the other American ports combined. New York was now the great Empire State.

Off to the south of the great canal lay the Finger Lakes with a smaller population that was doing everything in their power to build canals that would join them to the Erie Canal and its vast wealth. This was fine with the Erie Canal Authority because the Finger Lakes could then be used as a backup source of water for the