Monongahela and Ohio Steam Boat Company - Philadelphia Meeting

Philadelphia Meeting

After the St. Louis voyage, Elisha Hunt made the decision to use steamboats for river commerce. To this end he made the 290-mile trip to Philadelphia during the autumn of 1812. While he was there, arrangements were made and a stock company was formed to construct steamboats and carry passengers and freight by steamboats between Pittsburgh and New Orleans. The stock of this company was divided into six shares, of which Joseph White owned two or one-third of the whole amount stock. Daniel French, a Connecticut man, owned a patent for steamboats, and had built a little stern wheel steamboat on his plan, which was then running as a ferry boat between Cooper's Point, Camden, New Jersey, and Philadelphia.

French said he could construct steamboats that would run five miles an hour, against the current of the Mississippi river, and an arrangement was made with him by which he sold to the company the right to use his patent west of the Allegheny mountains. The services of French were engaged, shops were erected at Brownsville, Pennsylvania, tools for working in iron were made, logs were cut into plank with whip saws, and with the ferry boat above mentioned as their model, they constructed the steamboat Enterprise, costing about fifteen thousand dollars, and in the latter part of the summer of 1813 she left Pittsburgh for New Orleans, under the command of Captain Henry Shreve, who was the son of Israel Shreve, of Burlington county, New Jersey, a Colonel in the Revolutionary army.

In December 1812, Elisha and Caleb Hunt transported Daniel French, his three sons and a steam engine from Philadelphia to the valley of the Monongahela River in western Pennsylvania. The trip was documented by Caleb Hunt's grandson, James Walker Roberts, on a tag which was attached to his grandfather's "steamboat watch":

Early in the nineteenth century Uncle Elisha Hunt, Caleb Hunt, and four others had hauled across the Allegheny Mountains to Brownsville, Pa., a steam engine and machinery...

The Philadelphia meeting between Elisha Hunt, Joseph White and Daniel French was a success. Joseph White, the third shareholder in the fledgling steamboat company, would remain in Philadelphia where his hardware business was located. The basic business plan was this: Elisha Hunt would promote the use of Daniel French's steam engines and then French would build them. The nucleus of a steamboat company had been formed. But before a steamboat could be built the company needed a large increase in capital.