THE stories of Colonial America embodied in the decorations of old blue-china conclude with a review of the new modes of travel introduced by our forefathers, for, although theirs was the leisurely day of the stage coach and the sailing vessel, it was their good fortune to witness the dawn of the Age of Steam.
Many persons are familiar with the engraving, frequently found upon old-time parlor walls, of the small boy sitting at a tea-table pressing a spoon over the nose of the kettle and watching the steam lift the lid. The boy was James Watt, who in the year 1774 inaugurated in England trial tests of the strange power he had thus discovered. Half a century later, the people of America were gazing in wonder and awe upon the sight of boats moving up the Hudson River, and of coaches passing over the land, by means of this same magic power.
Success in steam experiment was attained with watervehicles at a period earlier than with coaches operated upon land, the clumsy little vessels pictured upon the dinner plates sailing the American rivers and lakes a number of years before the whistle of primitive locomotives waked the sleeping echoes in our valleys. The last quarter of the eighteenth century, a number of European and American inventors, mindful of the ancient prophecy that "a steam carriage would one day go almost as fast as birds fly," experimented with the newfound power and turned out eccentric vehicles. In the year 1788, John Fitch, a Philadelphia clock maker, launched a steamboat with a row of propelling paddles on either side (the idea of wheels not occurring to him), and with three ranges of chains, suggested by his trade, along the sides. Failure to interest the public in his experiment brought him but the popular verdict, "Poor fellow! What a pity he is crazy." Another Philadelphian, Oliver Evans, fitted a sort of scow with a steam engine, added paddle wheels to the stern and set it on wheels. He ran this contrivance through the streets of Philadelphia out to the Schulykill River, where he launched it and propelled it down the stream and up the Delaware to the city. About the same time, Colonel Stevens and his son were constructing such marvelous engines in their shops in Hoboken that the fame of the family crossed the seas, and a view of the Stevens mansion, which was considered one of the handsomest homes in America, found its way upon English pottery. The illustration portrays a large Colonial house set in a spacious lawn, shaded with tall pine trees.
But it remained for Robert Fulton, with the aid of Chancellor Livingston, to carry to success the experiments of those who had paved the way in steam navigation. Fulton first made trials of steam engines upon the rivers of France, before bringing, in the year 1806, an English engine to New York, where he ordered a hull built for it in the East River shipyards. There the new fangled thing was jeered at and dubbed "Fulton's Folly." And indeed the Clermont, as he named the boat for the country home of Chancellor Livingston, was a novel sight—the engine in plain view of the passengers, the boiler set in masonry and covered with a little house like that on a canal boat, the rudder resembling the rudder of a sailing vessel, and huge uncovered paddle wheels revolving heavily upon either side.
Upon a beautiful Sabbath morning in August in the year 1807, the Clermont made her trial trip up the Hudson River, her decks filled with Fulton's guests. The ride was a thrilling experience, the passengers all the time fearful for their lives, and the inventor by no means certain that his vessel would move in the water. The Clermont started bravely, went a short distance, then stopped. "I told you so," might have been heard among the passengers, but Fulton adjusted the parts and on they went, the machinery groaning and creaking, and the water splashing the deck and mingling with the clouds of cinders from the engine. Soon another trouble presented itself—the captains of sailing vessels, jealous of this new rival in their field, ran into the Clermont and then made the accident appear the fault of the new vessel's clumsiness. The fiery object moving up the river struck such terror to the folk along the bank that some of the more ignorant among them fell upon their knees and prayed to be delivered from the monster, while those less timid long looked upon the power obtained from fire and water as of the Evil One. The vessel reached Albany in safety. "I ran it up in thirty-two hours and down in thirty hours. The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved," wrote Fulton to a friend, after the accomplishment of the journey.
The success of the Clermont paved the way for the construction of other vessels, and the following spring, to the intense delight of the people, the era of steamboat navigation was launched by the establishment of regular sailings between New York and Albany. Little by little, luxurious equipment and furnishings were added to the boats, such as cabins fitted with comfortable beds, bands of music on board, and, an item of especial interest, dining tables were provided with sets of blue dishes ordered from Staffordshire decorated with pictures of the boats. Surviving specimens of these sets are to-day highly prized.
One of the earliest of the Hudson River boats, the steamship Fulton (a disputed sketch of which is presented), was considered a very marvel of elegance and luxury. "There is not in the whole world such accommodations afloat as the Fulton affords," a journal of the day commented, adding the prophecy, "Indeed, it is hardly possible to conceive that anything of the kind can exceed her in elegance and convenience." The Fulton was built in the year 1814 and plied between New York and Albany, starting from the foot of Cortlandt Street every Saturday morning and arriving in Albany on Sunday morning, the fare being ten dollars; she had accommodations for 60 passengers. The Fulton was the first boat to make the dangerous passage of Hell Gate, as a reward for the feat receiving the name of the inventor. In the "Landing of Lafayette" scene which is presented in a former chapter the steamboat in the center was intended to represent the Fulton, but is wrongly drawn, as the real Fulton was fitted with one mast only for sails, while she is shown with three; she had but one funnel.
The other large steamboat in the "Landing" scene at the Battery is the Chancellor Livingston, the last boat designed by Robert Fulton and not completed until after his death. Another old-china decoration exhibits the Chancellor Livingston sailing the Hudson River near the town of Fishkill, a location readily recognized at the present time and one which no doubt appealed for its picturesque beauty to the old-time English artists. The Chancellor Livingston measured 165 feet in length, had a draft of seven feet, and her 75 horse-power engine carried her on an average of eight miles an hour. Her sleeping and dining apartments, it is recorded, were noted for their luxury. She was the most powerful and the most elegantly appointed vessel in the world at the time General Lafayette came to America on his famous visit, and for this reason she was chosen to carry the nation's guest in the great "Landing" naval parade.
Another notable steamboat was the Chief Justice Marshall, of which there is a sketch preserved upon specimens of her tableware, framed in the familiar border of sea-shells and mosses. The Chief Justice Marshall was built in 1825, and, as the large-lettered sign upon her rail announces, she belonged to the "Troy Line" of vessels. The "Union Line" was a rival Hudson River Company and one of its fleet, similar in type to the Troy vessels, is also reproduced. Three examples of early Pennsylvania steamboats appear upon specimens of the dinner service in use in their dining rooms. One of them is a single-funnelled side-wheeler greatly resembling the Clermont, from which no doubt it was modeled; this appears in the chapter upon Philadelphia. Another one, here presented, is a stern-wheel vessel; both are represented as steaming past the Dam and Waterworks of the Schuylkill River, near Philadelphia. The third Pennsylvania steamboat, with the name Pennsylvania in plain view upon her wheel-box, is fitted with two funnels and is pictured before the city of Pittsburgh, at that time but a small group of buildings at the foot of the mountains on the bank of the Allegheny River. In the view of the harbor of Detroit, Michigan, which a previous chapter presents, a number of other interesting types of primitive American craft may also be seen.
Until the year 1831, all steam-vessels were equipped with one or more masts for sails, the old-time device being retained in order to make use of the wind in case of trouble with the engine, or to attain greater speed. The mania for fast sailing thus early seized upon the people, and racing upon the rivers resulted in many accidents. The first accident occurred in 1830, to the Chief Justice Marshall, her boilers bursting as she was leaving the dock at Newburgh one day, many of her passengers being injured. The steamboats upon the western rivers became notorious for racing. To "Never be passed on the river" was the slogan of the Mississippi engineers, and in order to acquire more steam from the blazing pine knots in the furnace they sometimes threw lard and hams into the flames; oft-times the interior of the boat would be destroyed for fuel before port was reached. Bursting of boilers and grounding on snags became such frequent occurrences that upon the Ohio and Mississippi river banks groups of stranded passengers might often have been seen waiting for a passing vessel to pick them up and carry them to their journey's end. General Lafayette, while on his tour of the West in 1824, had a narrow escape from drowning in the Ohio River through the reckless speeding of the small steamboat he was in, the engineer landing the craft upon a snag in the middle of the stream. At midnight upon a dark night, Our Nation's Guest, in scant attire, had to be lifted bodily into a small boat and rowed ashore. A mattress was rescued from the waves, shelter was found under a tree, and there the great man was forced to remain until a passing steamer took him aboard. In 1825, "safety barges" were attached to steamers by cables, and the passengers occupied them at ease, unworried over the possible bursting of the boiler or the grounding of the steamboat in front of them.
The change from the old to the new mode of travel upon land—stage coach and horses to carriages drawn by steam locomotives—came a few years later than the change from sailing vessels to steamboats, and the innovation was slower of adoption by our forefathers. The "Old Style" and "New Style" of travel are curiously illustrated in a design impressed upon the sides of an old English pitcher. Underneath the historic dates "1800" and "1848" are the words "Past" and "Present" and "The Two Drivers." Upon one side of the pitcher is pictured a stage-coach driver, a man of rotund figure, wearing a large hat and carrying a whip; upon the opposite side, a small boy is seen seated in the branches of a tree and gazing down in wonder upon a locomotive running over an iron track.
A real personage was the stage coach driver, usually a portly, florid-faced man wearing an air of authority that was most impressive, and, when seated upon his box grasping the reins of his four- or six-in-hand, he was looked up to by the villagers along his route as almost the equal of the squire or the minister. In addition to carrying passengers, the stage coach driver was accustomed to perform many other duties of various kinds. He delivered messages, paid bills or collected them, was an agent of banks and brokers—and all of this business he carried in his head, or his hat! For a stage driver's hat, even in the days when the monstrous bell crown was the fashion, was usually filled with letters and parcels put there for safe keeping, the owner being thus a combined forerunner of the modern postman, expressman and parcel post. No doubt, had the stage driver been told that one day two parallel iron rails and a tea kettle on wheels would dethrone him from his proud position and render staging unfashionable and almost obsolete, he would have smiled in pity upon the speaker as either a fool or a madman.
Previous to the time locomotives were introduced into America, the country was a maze of stage routes, the year 1811 showing 37,000 miles of post roads, several state roads and a national turnpike, each thoroughfare dotted here and there along its way with roomy, slopingroofed taverns for the accommodation of travelers. Before the introduction of regular stage routes, the post had been carried by men on horseback, from city to city. In 1755, Benjamin Franklin, who acted as postmaster, gave notice that mail between Philadelphia and New England would start by post once a week, "whereby answers may be obtained to letters between Philadelphia and Boston in three weeks, which used to require six weeks." After the Revolutionary War, a scheme was set on foot to form a line of posts from Falmouth, New England, to Savannah, Georgia, "with cross posts where needful." The first stage between Boston and New York started in June, 1772, to run once a fortnight as "a useful, new, and expensive undertaking," the time required for the journey being thirteen days! A half century later, in 1829, the "Albany Coach" left Boston three times a week, and arrived in Albany on the third day at noon, the distance being 160 miles and the fare six dollars ; the "Boston and New York Mail" left Boston daily at ten o'clock in the morning and arrived the second afternoon in New York. The "Pilot Stage" ran from New York to Philadelphia daily in 14 to 16 hours, fare ten dollars, with accommodations in summer for seven passengers. It had connections with another line for Baltimore and Washington, whence still another carried the passengers on to Richmond. Imagination pictures the long, delightful hours of these journeys for indulgence in political discussions or personal gossip, and for enjoyment of the scenery through which the stages passed!
The change from stage coach to steam carriage aroused in the country an opposition similar to that which prevailed when steamboat travel was broached. "What is to become of America," the critics asked, "after the unfortunate country has fed to its locomotives the last pound of its limited supply of coal ?" The rapid rate of travel and the shock of the sudden stopping, they argued, could never be endured until we had brains of brass or iron. Tales came from England, where, following the successful experiments of George Stephenson with his "Puffing Billy," steam cars had already been introduced, of the brains of business men becoming so addled by the swiftness of railroad travel that they forgot what they had set out for and had to write home to find out. One elderly gentleman, after a prolonged debauch of railroad travel, dashed his brains against a post and shivered them to pieces, a gruesome story ran. The introduction of steam power was a source of grief to John Ruskin, who saw in it a menace to peace and welfare. The rural villages of this country did not relish the notion of their quiet being disturbed by noisy trains. Daniel Webster drove out one day to Quincy from Boston, to inspect the horse-power railroad in operation at the quarries, and on his way back he shook his head and gave it as his opinion that the frosts on the rails in winter would prove a difficulty which never could be overcome.
In spite of protests, however, the idea of steam travel on land gained friends, and in the summer of 1829 four locomotives were ordered from England for trial on the rails already laid at quarries and mines for cars operated by horses. One of the English engines, the "Stourbridge Lion," was hauled to the tracks of the Delaware and Hudson Railroad near Honesdale, Pennsylvania, and its historic run was made the occasion for a holiday, the entire countryside turning out to witness the trial. No one believed the strange monster would go, even the man who guided her being in doubt, for the timber of the roadway had cracked and warped from the summer's heat, and a thirty-foot trestle over a creek had to be crossed on a curve. "As I placed my hand on the throttle valve handle," he afterwards said, "I was undecided whether I should move slowly or with a fair degree of speed, but preferring, if I did go down, to go handsomely, I started with considerable velocity, passed the curves over the creek safely and was soon out of hearing of the cheers of the vast assemblage. ... At the end of two or three miles I reversed the valve and returned without accident, having made the first locomotive trip on the Western Hemisphere." The "Stourbridge Lion" is now in the National Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
The railroad fever then quickly seized upon the people and spread like a contagion; charters for new roads multiplied; iron-banded wooden rails were laid throughout the land; engines were built, odd-looking contrivances, with vertical, bottle-shaped boilers, chimney-like smokestacks and tenders merely an open platform on wheels. Each locomotive originally was given a name, as is the custom with vessels to-day, a custom still in vogue in several countries of Europe. The earliest passenger coaches were modeled after the stage coach, with seats both inside and out, the inside seats being at first arranged around the sides; later on, the center aisle with which we are familiar was adopted, in preference to the English compartment model with a narrow ledge along the outside—a style which continues in use in the Old World.
The two scenes which are framed in the rich shell border of Enoch Wood are of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which was built to connect the eastern States with the semi-wilderness region of the Ohio River. The first scene represents an early locomotive of the English type, drawing a load of freight cars; the second, a stationary engine may be seen at the summit of a hill near the entrance to a mine, with a number of cars running down a very steep grade. The corner stone of the Baltimore and Ohio was laid in Baltimore July 4, 1828, by Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, and was an event of great importance, celebrated by a procession, and, it is recorded, by sending to Lafayette (who had visited Baltimore a few years before) a line pair of specially designed satin shoes, which were placed in the museum at La Grange.
In the year 1829, Peter Cooper built the “Tom Thumb,” a model one-horse power engine, and ran it for a short distance upon the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio, but regular service of railway travel in America was not established until the following year. Peter Cooper describes the “Tom Thumb” thus: “The engine was a very small and insignificant affair. It was made at the time I had become the owner of all the land now belonging to the Canton Company, the value of which I believed depended almost entirely upon the success of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. When I had completed the engine I invited the directors to witness an experiment. Some thirty-six persons entered one of the passenger cars, and four rode on the locomotive, which carried its own fuel and water; and made the first passage of thirteen miles over an average ascending grade of eighteen feet to the mile, in one hour and twelve minutes. We made the return trip in fifty-seven minutes.” Several of the favored directors, we learn else where, who were aboard the train upon this historic run, took out their notebooks and wrote sentences in them in order to prove that they were able to do so while traveling at such rapid speed.
In the cup and saucer decorations another early locomotive, whether of English or American manufacture is a disputed question, may be seen drawing a passenger car of the stage coach type, a car which closely resembles those which were used upon the tracks of the Mohawk and Hudson River Railroad. The honor of being the first railway line to establish regular train service in America belongs, however, to the Charleston and Hamburg Railroad of South Carolina, with a bottle-shaped vertical engine known as “The Best Friend of Charleston”; this was in the year 1830.
An interesting scene, printed in pale blue and framed in delicate mosses, pictures one of the first railway trains to be run in New York State-without doubt one of the earliest representations of the old DeWitt Clinton engine, the pride of museums and expositions ever since the day she made her historic run from Albany to Schenectady, over the tracks of the Mohawk and Hudson River Railroad. It was a joyous occasion, and not since the opening of the Erie Canal six years previous was there so great excitement. The people of the countryside along the route turned out to view the spectacle, for long distances lining the track on both sides with all sorts of vehicles. Chronicles of the period relate how on the evening of August 8, 1831, the guests who were to board the train on the following morning bought their tickets at the hotel in Albany, and how at daybreak they made their way to the outskirts of the city and were carried up a hill to the place where the train awaited them. The state otlicials occupied the foremost coaches (some of them stage coaches pressed into service), while as many persons as possible seated themselves along the sides of the cars and upon the roofs, hundreds, however, for lack of room either to sit or stand, being obliged to remain behind. The time came to start; a horn tooted; the engineer, fearful that the load was too heavy for his engine, started with such a jerk that it sent hats flying and people sprawling. Forward the train moved out into the country, the passengers enjoying the novel experience of the rapidly unrolling scenery, when unexpected trouble developed--clouds of sparks streamed from the engine over those who were upon the roofs, setting fire to their clothing, and the umbrellas raised for protection were quickly tossed overboard in flames. The crowds of people along the track cheered lustily the novel spectacle; horses jumped and ran in terror from the snorting monster; at last, the train came to a stop upon the summit of a hill, and the jolted passengers were lowered to the city of Schenectady, their journey at an end. The festivities of celebration continued-music, cannon, salutes, processions, speeches—and the eventful day ended with a banquet where was offered the prophetic toast: "The Buffalo Railroad: May we soon breakfast at Utica, dine at Rochester, and sup with our friends on Lake Erie."
In this manner was ushered in the Age of Steam, that historic era in which sailing vessels and stage coaches, the last mementoes of our Colonial forefathers which English pottery records, gradually gave place to the steam-driven ships and railway trains of the present. At some future time, it will no doubt come to pass that new marvels of science will cause the luxurious trains and steamships of the present day to appear as clumsy and old-fashioned as the little boats and locomotives which are pictured upon the old blue dishes appear to the youthful generation of to-day.
(From The Blue-China Book by Ada Walker Camehl, 1916.)
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