A Bit of History
1831
Steamboats Arrive in Florida
The George Washington[1]
On May 18th, 1831 the George Washington was the first steamboat to visit Florida reaching Jacksonville after a thirty-four hour trip from Savannah. At ninety feet, eight inches long, long, nineteen feet, nine inches wide, and five feet, three inches, the George Washington was a , an adventurous eighty-six ton side-wheel paddler built in Charleston and was typical of steamboats of the time. The arrival of the George Washington would spark what would later become the “Golden Age” of steamboating to the communities along the St. Johns River. Different then the larger oceangoing vessels, steamboats on the St. Johns River were shallower in draft due to the low tides and constant shifting sandbars at the mouth of the St. Johns on the Atlantic. This worked both ways as the deeper draft ocean steamships could not enter the St. Johns River and the shallow draft river steamships could only make short, often rough, trips along the coast and then only in calm weather. By 1831 ocean steamboat traffic was common along the east coast with the two southern ports of Charleston and Savannah common ports for transfers between the larger ocean-going vessels and the smaller coastal steamships. Different than the larger stern wheeler steamships that plied the Mississippi, the east coastal steamships generally were side wheelers with a paddle wheel on each side of the ship.
Steamboats were exploding across the rivers of the U.S., sometimes quite literally, from the Pensacola Gazette, April 4th, 1830.
Another Steam-Boat Accident – The New Orleans papers inform us, that the William Tell, on her passage from Pittsburgh to that place, burst her boiler 3 miles above the mouth of the Red River, and sunk in five minutes; she was, with her cargo, entirely lost. No information had been received of the loss of any life.
The kinks in the steam technology that brought the Industrial Revolution still needed to be worked out.
(See Steamboat Frenzy)
[1] Mueller, Edward A. “Steamboat Activity in Florida during the Second Seminole Indian War.” The Florida Historical Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 4, 1986, pp. 407–31. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30146682.