As a leader in the shipbuilding economy
Due to our landlocked location, most Hoosiers don’t see Indiana as a leader in the shipbuilding economy, yet it’s a role we’ve been playing for almost two centuries at the same spot where Jeffboat now stands.
“Look out the window and you can see a barge being built,” says Lowell Smith, a docent at the Howard Steamboat Museum across the street from the nation’s largest inland boat builder. “They’ve been building boats here for a long time.”
Indeed, boat builders have occupied the site since 1820, four years after Indiana statehood. Robert C. Green came first, followed by William and Henry French, who sold their shipyard to 19-year-old James Howard in 1834. Three generations of Howards operated the yard until the U.S. Navy acquired it in 1941.
The museum preserves memorabilia from the steamboat era — roughly the 1830s through 1900 — and is housed in a 22-room Romanesque Revival mansion built by Edmonds Howard and his family in 1894.
In the days before the steamboat, there was no good way to travel or move products. Flatboats carried goods, but going upstream took forever. When a flatboat reached its destination, it was usually taken apart and sold for lumber, and its crew walked or rode horses home.
John Fitch built the first steamboat in America in the 1780s, and Robert Fulton made the invention a success. His boat, the Clermont, took the first commercial voyage up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany and back in 1807.