by Tracy McKenna

As seen in Antiques & Art Around Florida, Winter/Spring 1995

The Lucas Line ran several steamboats along the St. Johns & Oklawaha Rivers in the 1890's. Shown here is the Metamora, carrying sightseers along the Oklawaha. William Henry Jackson, Detroit Photo Co., 1898-1904. All photos are from FLORIDA PORTRAYED Museum of Art and History.

The first recorded steamboat to visit Florida arrived in 1827, ushering in an era of river travel that spanned a century and forever changed the state. The steamboat age produced a unique variety of collectibles and memorabilia that, today, provide a fascinating glimpse of an historic period in Florida's development.

Prior to the advent of steamships, sailing ships had long carried supplies and passengers to the coastal settlements of Key West, Pensacola and St. Augustine. But these deep keeled, wind powered vessels were unable to navigate the winding, often times shallow rivers of the interior, leaving it largely unexplored, undeveloped and sparsely populated.

This began to change in the 1840s with the start of regularly scheduled steamboat service along the St. Johns River between Jacksonville and Palatka. The first steamers brought freight and occasional passengers to and from previously isolated towns along the route, and soon became the focal point of merchant activity. Florida's citrus industry was born, as growers along the river hurried to prepare oranges for shipment to Jacksonville, or sold fruit baskets to passing travelers.

At the same time, the foundations for the state's other great industry were being laid by early steamboat pioneers like Jacob Brock. His Brock Line was the first to establish service beyond Palatka, south to the remote community of Enterprise. Realizing its potential as a winter tourist destination, he built a northern style hotel with accommodations for fifty people in 1855. Not only did the Brock House become a haven for Florida's first tourists - mostly invalids seeking a mild winter climate - but the area quickly earned a reputation as a sportsman's paradise. Wild game abounded in this largely pristine wilderness, and soon hunters and fishermen filled the Brock House, as well as Brock Line steamers, to overflowing.

Personal accounts of a prominent traveler's passage up Florida's rivers were popular reading in the late 19th Century, and many were published in northern newspapers & magazines. Former President Ulysses S. Grant's historic trip up the Ocklawaha was chonicled in the February 14, 1889 edition of Harper's Weekly, accompanied by this wood engraving by Frank H. Taylor.

Commercial and recreational steamboat activity continued to increase until the Civil War, when a Federal Blockade halted all travel. River traffic resumed with a fervor in the 1870s, bringing the largest influx of settlers in the state's history, many of them veterans that had been stationed in Florida during the War. Their widespread accounts of abundant wildlife, exotic scenery and an agreeable climate helped spawn the 1880s tourist boom.

Steamboats operated throughout Northern and Central Florida at this time, carrying mostly freight along the Suwanee, Kissimmee, Apalachicola and Caloosa-hatchee Rivers, to name a few. But the St. Johns River was the heart of steamboat activity, and towns along it flourished with the arrival of northern sightseers. Most visitors arrived in Jacksonville via Charleston by train or ocean steamship, then went on to St. Augustine and Palatka by boat. Palatka served as a transfer point for those wanting to travel up the narrower Ocklawaha to thenow famous Silver Springs. Another popular tourist destination was the Tomoka River, near Ormond Beach.

Hotels and curios shops proliferated at these locations, as did photographers seeking to capitalize on tourist traffic. Some of the most abundant souvenirs of the era are photographs of passengers embarking on day trips from locations such as Palatka and Silver Springs, as well as photos, postcards and stereoscopic views of steamships and river scenes.

Sightseers visited the Tomoka River on small hired steamboats out of Ormond Beach. Note alligator in foreground. C. 1885

Promotional pamphlets and guidebooks put out by competing lines are especially interesting, often featuring colorful illustrations of Florida's unique flora and fauna, and of the majestic steamships that plied its waters. The DeBary Merchant Line's early guidebook "Into Tropical Florida" attempted to lure visitors south with descriptions of a "splendid natural domain" ripe with "fine hotels", "magnificent orange groves" and "beautiful sheets of water abounding with fish." It also reassured prospective visitors that "There has never been a case of yellow fever in the interior south of Palatka, and there is no reason to believe there ever will be."

By far the most plentiful souvenirs from the steamboat era were those sold at curios shops which catered to river travelers. Among these were collectible spoons and ceramics, which often depict the tropical scenery and wildlife that attracted tourists to Florida in the first place. Alligators were perhaps the most popular subject, their figures emblazoned on everything from letter openers to napkin rings, and molded into effigies of wood, metal and celluloid.

With the arrival of the railroad in the 1880s and 1890s came a decline in steamboat popularity. Some lines continued to operate, though on a smaller scale, until the 1920s, when highways dealt a final blow to river travel. At the height of the steamboat era, in 1886, seventy four vessels ran regularly out of Jacksonville.