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    Steamboats on Long Island Sound
    Steamboats on Long Island Sound
    Steamboats on Long Island Sound
    Ebook165 pages1 hour

    Steamboats on Long Island Sound

    By Norman J. Brouwer

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    Robert Fulton built the world’s first commercially successful steamboat in 1807, but it was not until after the War of 1812 that these vessels entered service along the Long Island Sound. For 127 years, between 1815 and 1942, steamboats provided a link between New York and cities in southern New England, greatly reducing travel time. Steamboats served the Connecticut cities of Stamford, Norwalk, Bridgeport, Derby, New Haven, Hartford, New London, Norwich, and Stonington. They also linked New York to the Rhode Island cities of Newport, Bristol, and Providence as well as the southern Massachusetts cities of Fall River and New Bedford. The rapid expansion of industries in southern New England gave steamboats the additionally important role of transporting raw materials to mills and factories and their finished products to New York. Rivalries between steamboat services led to the construction of faster, larger, and more elegantly furnished boats, resulting in the “floating palaces” that were some of the largest and most majestic steamboats the world had ever seen.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateNov 3, 2014
    ISBN9781439648230
    Steamboats on Long Island Sound
    Author

    Norman J. Brouwer

    After spending time in the Navy and Merchant Marine, Norman J. Brouwer was employed in the maritime museum field for over 30 years. He currently resides in Mystic, Connecticut, near Long Island Sound, where he has gathered historic images from numerous collections.

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      Book preview

      Steamboats on Long Island Sound - Norman J. Brouwer

      (SSHSA).

      INTRODUCTION

      By the late 1700s, a number of people in Europe and North America had experimented with using the power of steam to propel boats. The most successful in this country had been John Fitch, a clockmaker and gunsmith from Connecticut, who operated a steamboat on the Delaware River in 1790, carrying passengers between Philadelphia and Trenton, New Jersey. Around the same time, a mechanic named Samuel Morey had been experimenting with a small steamboat on the upper Connecticut River. Morey was also born in Connecticut, but when he was a child, his father moved the family to Orford, New Hampshire. Morey experimented with a steamboat at Orford, which, according to reports of witnesses, was so small it only accommodated the machinery and the person operating it. Writing around 30 years later, Morey recalled also operating a steamboat at Hartford and demonstrating steamboats at New York City and Philadelphia. In spite of valiant efforts, in the end, neither Fitch nor Morey was able to obtain the financial backing he needed to continue his experiments. Fitch moved out to Kentucky to try his hand at farming, and Morey turned his mechanical talents to non-maritime inventions, for which he obtained 21 patents. These included several steam engines and one of the earliest internal combustion engines.

      The person who finally pulled together all the elements needed for real success was Pennsylvanian Robert Fulton. During an extended stay in Europe, Fulton met Robert Livingston, chancellor of the State of New York and negotiator of this country’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory. Before departing this country in 1801 to become our minister to France, Livingston had been involved in unsuccessful steamboat projects in the New York area. Fulton had gone to Europe to study painting but became interested in canal engineering and the possibilities of undersea warfare and steam-powered boats. By 1804, he was demonstrating a steamboat on the Seine River in Paris. Livingston saw real possibilities in Fulton’s designs, and they agreed to continue the work in the United States.

      Robert Fulton now had the political and financial backing he needed. He arranged for the purchase and shipping of a steam engine designed by the Scottish inventor James Watt and returned to New York to install it in a boat. The result was the North River Steamboat of 1807, later to become popularly known as the Clermont. She was the world’s first commercially successful steam-powered vessel. From that date forward, the continuous development of steam vessels was assured. Fulton died in February 1815 after a brief illness. In the less than eight years since his 1807 success, he had designed and built the first double-ended steam ferryboats, the world’s first steam-powered warship, and steamboats for a number of waters, including Long Island Sound.

      Sheltered from the ocean by the landmass of Long Island, the sound is a splendid avenue for marine transportation. For most of its 90 miles, it is broad, deep, and little obstructed. At its west end, it provides an entrance to New York Harbor. A number of the nation’s oldest cities and towns lie along its north shore in the state of Connecticut. Not far beyond its eastern end are the ports of the state of Rhode Island and the southernmost ports in Massachusetts. Steamboat navigation ended there, until the opening of the canal through the neck of Cape Cod in 1916. The trip around Cape Cod, out in the potentially rough seas of the Atlantic, required vessels built for that purpose.

      As steam-powered craft evolved, two distinct types were developed. Steamboats were designed to operate in sheltered waters of rivers, lakes, or sounds. They were built with flat bottoms to run in shallow waters, main decks not far above the water, and passenger and cargo spaces in multidecked superstructures. In contrast, steamships were designed to operate on the open ocean, withstanding any sea conditions they might encounter. They were given deeper hulls, fully planked or plated sides, and main decks well above the water. Most passenger or cargo spaces were within the hull. Size was not the determining factor. The largest steamboats on Long Island Sound in the mid-1800s were almost as large as oceangoing steamships of the same period. The boats built to operate on overnight services on Long Island Sound have always been termed steamboats, but their designs incorporated one important steamship feature. Because they might encounter rough seas in the sound under some conditions, or in the exposed waters off Rhode Island, they were given high bows enclosed by planking or plating.

      There were two attempts to consolidate all the Long Island Sound steamboat services under one ownership. In the 1830s and 1840s, Cornelius Vanderbilt bought up all the major lines, usually after ruinous rate wars, which he, unlike his competitors, had the resources to survive. Around 1849, he sold off his holdings on the sound and turned his interest to ocean steamships and, later, railroads. In the 1890s, under the virtual control of financier J.P. Morgan, the New Haven Railroad set about creating a monopoly of all transportation systems in southern New England. The railroad’s marine operations were placed under a subsidiary called the New England Steamship Company.

      There were several efforts in the early 20th century to operate overnight steamboats in opposition to the New Haven Railroad monopoly. The most successful proved to be the Colonial Line, operating boats between New York City and Providence, Rhode Island. After the Long Island Sound operations of the New Haven Railroad were shut down during labor troubles in 1937, the Colonial Line remained in operation for another five years, closing the era of the Long Island Sound overnight steamboats in March 1942, when its last boats were taken over by the government for use in World War II.

      One

      EARLY BEGINNINGS AND

      THE VANDERBILT ERA

      The first steamboat built for Long Island Sound was ready to go into service by 1814, but the

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