History
Just seven years after Robert Fulton proved the commercial viability of steam-powered ships with his North River Steamboat (more commonly known today as Clermont) in 1807, small wood-burning steamers began to ply the Chesapeake Bay. Prior to the coming of the railroads and river steamboats in the early 19th century, overland travel was an exceedingly slow and tedious undertaking. Rivers were the main means of transportation and most cities were founded on them. This was especially so in North America, where journeys over vast distances of hundreds or even thousands of miles required months of hazardous, uncomfortable travel by stagecoach or wagon on rutted, unpaved trails. In the 1830s, railroads were being built, but the technology was crude and average passenger train speed was only 12 miles per hour (19 km/h). Perhaps more importantly, most early railroads did not interconnect. It would be many years before the various lines were knitted together to make intercity rail travel in the U.S. a reality. Not until 1863, for example, was it possible to travel between New York City and Washington, D. C., without changing trains en route.
In this period, steamships on rivers such as the Ohio and Mississippi or large inland bodies of water such as the Great Lakes and the Chesapeake Bay offered a comfortable and relatively fast mode of transportation. The first steamboat to serve Baltimore was the locally built Chesapeake, constructed in 1813 to link Baltimore with Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Operated by the Union Line, the boat connected with a stagecoach for the overland portion of the journey. Two years later, the Briscoe-Partridge Line's Eagle was the first steamboat to sail the length of Chesapeake Bay.
The direct ancestor of the Baltimore Steam Packet Company was the Maryland & Virginia Steam Boat Company formed in 1828 to link Baltimore, Richmond, and Norfolk, traversing the Chesapeake Bay and the James River. By 1839, the Maryland & Virginia was heavily in debt from the purchase of two new, large ships the year before: the 210-foot (64 m) long Alabama and the 173-foot (53 m) Jewess. The Alabama was expensive to operate and proved to be impractical for Chesapeake Bay operations, causing the bankruptcy of the Maryland & Virginia later that year.
Read more about this topic: Baltimore Steam Packet Company
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The custard is setting; meanwhile
I not only have my own history to worry about
But am forced to fret over insufficient details related to large
Unfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point
Of being, with or without my help, if any were forthcoming.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)