STEAMBOAT WASHNGTON 1816 STAMP ISSUED MAR 3, 1989
In 1929, Garnett Laidlaw Eskew writes of Wheeling, West Virginia on page 32 in his critically acclaimed book, ‘The Pageant of the Packets, A Book of American Steamboating’:
“We wonder if Wheeling knows she is the birthplace of the American steamboat. Is Midland America aware that it is indebted to this West Virginia city for sending from her ways, in the spring of 1816, the first practical, thorough-going river craft, which was to revolutionize transportation in the West- the progenitor of the great white fleet which in thirty years was the wonder of the world? The chances are no, ten to one. And the chances are even greater that the rest of the Midlands does not know it.” In addition, he writes, “It is recorded that when the first steamboat took shape on the ways at Wheeling, the whole of the surrounding river country came to ridicule her and her builder, Henry Shreve.” “For the craft which Henry Shreve built there on the ways at Wheeling in 1816 violated, in her make-up, all the accepted principles of shipbuilding.” In building the Washington, “Shreve flung to the winds all precedent.”
SEE MY BOOKS: “A HISTORY OF THE STEAMBOAT WASHINGTON The First Successful Western Rivers Steamboat” by John Bowman AND “WHEELING THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE AMERICAN STEAMBOAT” by John Bowman