A team boat, horse boat, or horse ferry, is a watercraft powered by horses or mules, generally using a treadmill, which serves as a horse engine. [1] [2] Team boats were popular as ferries in the United States from the mid-1810s to the 1850s.
A team boat, horse boat, or horse ferry, is a watercraft powered by horses or mules, generally using a treadmill, which serves as a horse engine. [1] [2] Team boats were popular as ferries in the United States from the mid-1810s to the 1850s.
The first documented horse-powered boat in the United States was built on the Delaware River in 1791 by John Fitch. [3]
There are three types of team boats. In one, four or five horses are placed in each side of the boat in a circular treadwheel, and the paddle wheels, arranged like the side wheel steamboat of later days were turned by means of cogs and gearing connected with other cogs on the shaft of the paddle wheels. The horses were hitched to strong timbers and by a forward movement of the feet caused the treadwheel upon which they stood to revolve and thus operate the gear wheels. [1]
Another type of team boat uses a "horse whim," a type of horse mill. It has a large revolving wheel in the middle, and a center post known as a "whim" (or horse capstan). The horses, which are attached to the horse whim, walk around in a circle, causing the wheel or capstan to revolve, which in turn rotates gears that rotate the paddles, or bucket wheels. The team boat of this style consisted of two complete hulls, united by a deck or bridge, but separated far enough apart to allow the paddle wheel to be set between them. They are sharp at both ends, and can be propelled backward or forward with equal ease. [1]
A third design for team boats was invented in 1819, by Barnabas Langdon. Langdon's turntable design permitted the horses to walk straight ahead instead of in circles. "Langdon placed a rotating turntable slightly below the level of the boat's deck; horses stood atop the turntable through large slots in the deck and drove the wheel backward by walking in place. This design eased the burden on the horses, freed up valuable deck space, and allowed the ferry to be built atop one hull." [4]
One description of a turntable type team boat using six horses says, "The treadmills, on either side, were each trod by three horses always facing in the same direction. To reverse the paddlewheels it was only necessary to stop the horses a minute, and withdraw a drop pin that would reverse the gearing." [2]
The Experiment , built sometime around 1807-1810, was an early horse-powered ferry boat. It was a twelve-ton three-mast boat drawing a few feet of water, about 100 feet long by 20 feet beam. [5] Its driving mechanism, an in-water screw, was invented by David Grieve in 1801. The boat was constructed by David Wilkinson (some sources give his name as Varnum [6] ) in 1807 to 1810, depending on the source. [7] [8] [9] It was propelled by a "goose-foot paddle" large mechanical screw propeller in the water (instead of a paddle wheel at water surface). [8] The new technology devised by Grieve and Wilkinson was powered by eight horses on a treadmill. The horse boat technology to propel the boat upstream was originally invented by David Grieve and granted a patent February 24, 1801 in the patent category of "Boats to ascend rivers". The complete recorded patent was lost in the 1836 U.S. Patent Office fire. [10] The novel idea of propelling vessels upstream by the use of a large mechanical screw in the water is now referred to as Ericsson’s propeller. [5]
One of the first documented team boats in commercial service in the United States began running a Manhattan-Brooklyn route in 1814. [11] Carrying vehicles, horses, and two hundred humans on a typical run, it could take anywhere from eight to eighteen minutes to finish the East River crossing. [11] Team boats continued to serve New York City until 1824. [12]
Team boat ferries were very popular. First, they were thought to be cheaper to operate than any other type of ferry boat, and second, they did not incur fees under the Fulton-Livingston patents monopoly. [1] [2] In ferry service, horses could be stabled on land, and there was no need to feed them on the boat, because the work was intermittent. [13]
There were cases in which team boats replaced steam boats for reasons of economy. In 1812, two steam boats designed by Robert Fulton were placed in use in New York, for the Paulus Hook Ferry from the foot of Cortlandt Street, and on the Hoboken Ferry from the foot of Barclay Street. The Juliana, running from Barclay Street, was withdrawn from service, as announced, in favor of the more convenient horse boat. It is almost certain, however, that this retrograde step was taken because of the monopoly enjoyed by Mssrs. Fulton and Livingston for the navigation of the waters of New York State by steam. [14] In 1816, a steamboat company running ferry service between Halifax, Nova Scotia and Dartmouth had the law amended to permit the use of team boats instead. [15]
In August 1816, the team boat Moses Rogers in Newburgh, New York began service to Fishkill, New York, carrying wagons, coaches, carriages, horses, and passengers. [16] In 1817, the Union Team Boat ran between Long Bridge at Georgetown and Alexandria, Virginia. [17] [18] In 1821, William Dyer built a team boat serving Portsmouth, Virginia on the Elizabeth River. [19]
In 1838, Tremaine's Team Boat, using three horses, operated a ferry service at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. [20] Team boats with eight horses operated on the Ohio River at Cincinnati in 1819, and at Charleston, South Carolina, on the Ashley River in 1818 and 1827. The team boat crossing the Ohio could accommodate a stagecoach driving aboard. [21] [13]
Attempts were made with moderate success to ascend the Ohio and Mississippi with teams of horses on board. In 1824 the team boat Genius of Georgia operated on the Savannah River, under Captain William Bird, carrying a cargo of sundries. An 1820 report by the South Carolina Department of Public Works described a five-man boat powered by eight mules; it carried 300 bales of cotton 250 miles in fifteen days at a cost of just $116.25. However, for through traffic, the team boats never passed the experimental stage. [13]
The South Ferry horse ferry operating at Albany, New York in 1827 was replaced by a steamboat in 1828. The North Ferry horse ferry at Albany operated from 1831-1841. [22]
The team boats on the Delaware River serving Camden, New Jersey stopped for an hour at lunch time to feed the horses. [23] The Ridgeway was a double team boat, propelled by nine horses walking around a circle. She ran from the foot of Cooper Street. There was also a team boat named the Washington; she ran from Market Street, Camden, to Market Street, Philadelphia. Other team boats followed in succession, namely the Phoenix, Constitution, Moses Lancaster, and Independence. [24] The Cooper's Ferry Daybook, 1819-1824, documenting Camden's Point Pleasant Teamboat, survives to this day. [25]
Horse powered ferries have also been documented in Wisconsin and New Hampshire. [26]
A shipwreck discovered in 1983 in Lake Champlain, the Burlington Bay Horse Ferry, is an example of a turntable team-boat. [27] [28] It served on one of approximately five horse ferry crossings operating on Lake Champlain from about 1820 to 1850. [26] They reached their peak in the 1830s and 1840s, before their 1850s replacement by steamboats. [29]
In the 1880s, in New Haven, Missouri and Waverly, Missouri, the Tilda Clara and General Harrison ferries across the Missouri River were powered by four horse teams. [30]
A ferry powered by horses and mules operated on the Mississippi River at St. Mary, Missouri as recently as 1910. [3] The last known horse ferry remained in service until the late 1920s on the Tennessee River. [31]
A steamboat is a boat that is propelled primarily by steam power, typically driving propellers or paddlewheels. Steamboats sometimes use the prefix designation SS, S.S. or S/S or PS ; however, these designations are most often used for steamships.
Samuel Morey was an American inventor, who worked on early internal combustion engines and was a pioneer in steamships who accumulated a total of 20 patents.
A paddle steamer is a steamship or steamboat powered by a steam engine that drives paddle wheels to propel the craft through the water. In antiquity, paddle wheelers followed the development of poles, oars and sails, where the first uses were wheelers driven by animals or humans.
A riverboat is a watercraft designed for inland navigation on lakes, rivers, and artificial waterways. They are generally equipped and outfitted as work boats in one of the carrying trades, for freight or people transport, including luxury units constructed for entertainment enterprises, such as lake or harbour tour boats. As larger water craft, virtually all riverboats are especially designed and constructed, or alternatively, constructed with special-purpose features that optimize them as riverine or lake service craft, for instance, dredgers, survey boats, fisheries management craft, fireboats and law enforcement patrol craft.
The Lake Champlain Transportation Company provides car and passenger ferry service at three points on Lake Champlain in the United States. From 1976 to 2003, it was owned by Burlington, Vermont, businessman Raymond C. Pecor Jr. who is Chairman of the company's board. In 2003, he sold the company to his son, Raymond Pecor III.
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Belle of Louisville is a steamboat owned and operated by the city of Louisville, Kentucky, and moored at its downtown wharf next to the Riverfront Plaza/Belvedere during its annual operational period. Originally named Idlewild, she was built by James Rees & Sons Company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the West Memphis Packet Company in 1914 and was first put into service on the Allegheny River. Constructed with an all-steel superstructure and asphalt main deck, the steamboat is said to hold the all-time record in her class for miles traveled, years in operation, and places visited. Belle of Louisville's offices are aboard Mayor Andrew Broaddus, also a National Historic Landmark.
A treadwheel, or treadmill, is a form of engine typically powered by humans. It may resemble a water wheel in appearance, and can be worked either by a human treading paddles set into its circumference (treadmill), or by a human or animal standing inside it (treadwheel). These devices are no longer used for power or punishment, and the term "treadmill" has come to mean an exercise machine for running or walking in place.
Daniel French (1770–1853), a "Yankee" inventor, was born in Berlin, Connecticut. From an early age French strove to become a "mechanician," an artisan trained in the theory of mechanics and skilled in the working of metals at increasing levels of precision. His friend Oliver Evans, an accomplished engineer, described French as an "original and ingenious inventor." French's most significant invention was the horizontally mounted, high-pressure, non-condensing, directly connected steam engine for mills, boats, etc. French was awarded a patent for his steam engine in 1809. This type of engine became standard on the western steamboat.
The steamboat Ticonderoga is one of two remaining side-paddle-wheel passenger steamers with a vertical beam engine of the type that provided freight and passenger service on America's bays, lakes and rivers from the early 19th to the mid-20th centuries. Commissioned by the Champlain Transportation Company, Ticonderoga was built in 1906 at the Shelburne Shipyard in Shelburne, Vermont on Lake Champlain.
Marine propulsion is the mechanism or system used to generate thrust to move a ship or boat across water. While paddles and sails are still used on some smaller boats, most modern ships are propelled by mechanical systems consisting of an electric motor or engine turning a propeller, or less frequently, in pump-jets, an impeller. Marine engineering is the discipline concerned with the engineering design process of marine propulsion systems.
The North River Steamboat or North River, colloquially known as the Clermont, is widely regarded as the world's first vessel to demonstrate the viability of using steam propulsion for commercial water transportation. Built in 1807, the North River Steamboat operated on the Hudson River – at that time often known as the North River – between New York City and Albany, New York. She was built by the wealthy investor and politician Robert Livingston and inventor and entrepreneur Robert Fulton (1765–1815).
The T.J. Potter was a paddle steamer that operated in the Northwestern United States. The boat was launched in 1888. Her upper cabins came from the steamboat Wide West. This required some modification, because the T.J. Potter was a side-wheeler, whereas the Wide West had been a stern-wheeler. The boat's first owner was the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company. The T. J. Potter was one of the few side-wheeler boats that operated on the Columbia River.
Many steamboats operated on the Columbia River and its tributaries, in the Pacific Northwest region of North America, from about 1850 to 1981. Major tributaries of the Columbia that formed steamboat routes included the Willamette and Snake rivers. Navigation was impractical between the Snake River and the Canada–US border, due to several rapids, but steamboats also operated along the Wenatchee Reach of the Columbia, in northern Washington, and on the Arrow Lakes of southern British Columbia.
The Willamette River flows northwards down the Willamette Valley until it meets the Columbia River at a point 101 miles from the Pacific Ocean, in the U.S. state of Oregon.
The Millersburg Ferry, also known as the Crow's Ferry, is the last operating ferry on the Susquehanna River. It crosses the river between Millersburg in Dauphin County and Buffalo Township in Perry County, Pennsylvania in the United States. The ferry was established in the early 19th century. The Millersburg Ferry crossing was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2006. Its ferry boat is believed to be the last "wooden double stern-wheel paddle boat" to be operating in the United States. It is owned by the Millersburg Chamber of Commerce and operated by the Millersburg Ferryboat Association from May until October when water levels permit.
Steamboat services started on the Thames in around 1815 and for nearly 25 years were the main use of steam to carry passengers before the emergence of railways in the south of England. During this time at least 80 steamers are recorded in the Thames and the Steamboat Act of 1819 became the first statute to regulate the safety of the new technology for the public. Wooden boats driven by paddle-wheels, they managed during this time to establish themselves as faster and more reliable than the earlier use of sailing and rowing boats for passenger transport within the Thames estuary.
Experiment was an early 19th-century boat powered by horses and incorporating the idea of a screw propeller, which was a new idea at the time.
Since the early 1980s, several non-steam-powered sternwheel riverboats have been built and operated on major waterways in the U.S. state of Oregon, primarily the Willamette and Columbia Rivers, as river cruise ships used for tourism. Although configured as sternwheelers, they are not paddle steamers, but rather are motor vessels that are only replicas of paddle steamers. They are powered instead by diesel engines. The Lurdine was, when launched in 1983, "the first passenger-carrying sternwheeler in decades to [operate] on the Columbia River". In the case of the 1983-built M.V. Columbia Gorge, the construction and operation of a tourist sternwheeler was led by local government officials who viewed the idea as potentially being a major tourist attraction, giving an economic boost to their area, Cascade Locks, Oregon.
Far West was a shallow draft sternwheel steamboat plying the upper Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers in the Dakota and Montana Territories, in the years from 1870 to 1883. By being involved in historic events in the Indian Wars of the western frontier, the Far West became an iconic symbol of the shallow draft steamboat plying the upper Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers in the era before railroads dominated transport in these areas.
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This article incorporates text from Old ferries, Camden, New Jersey; an address delivered before the Camden County Historical Society. Annals of Camden, vol. 3 , by Boyer, Charles Shimer., a publication from 1921, now in the public domain in the United States. This article incorporates text from Transportation in the Ante-bellum South: An Economic Analysis , in Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860, by Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell, a publication from 1908, now in the public domain in the United States. This article incorporates text from Origin and development of the ferryboat , in Marine Engineering/Log, Volume 1, by Stevens, A.E., a publication from 1897, now in the public domain in the United States.