Steamboat Town, Evansville and the River Trade
Near Evansville, Indiana
On a summer afternoon in eighteen fifty-five, a traveler arriving by steamboat at the Evansville levee would have stepped onto a wharf crowded with hogsheads of tobacco, bales of cotton, stacked lumber, and every kind of commercial noise. Roustabouts rolled barrels down gangplanks. Merchants argued prices in German and English simultaneously.
The air smelled of coal smoke and river mud and something else, the particular mix of ambition and anxiety that hangs over a boomtown. By the eighteen fifties, Evansville had become one of the most important river ports on the middle Ohio, the stretch between Louisville and the Mississippi confluence. Its position mattered enormously: it sat a short way upriver from the mouth of the Wabash River, the great drainage of central Indiana and eastern Illinois, which kept the produce of a vast interior within easy reach of Evansville.
The packet lines that called regularly at the Evansville levee had evocative names, the Lady Pike, the Sunshine, the Ben Franklin, and they carried everything the region produced and everything it needed. Tobacco from Kentucky crossed the river. Corn and pork from Indiana farms moved downriver.
In return, the boats brought dry goods, iron hardware, coffee, and sugar. This river commerce built the merchant class that would eventually fund Evansville's mansions and civic institutions. Men like John Augustus Reitz, who built the great Victorian home that still stands on First Street, made their fortunes in timber and wholesale goods tied directly to the river trade.
The railroads arrived in the eighteen fifties and changed the calculus, but they did not kill the river. They reorganized it. Evansville remained a transshipment point, a place where rail and river met, well into the twentieth century.
The levee quieted eventually, but the wealth it had generated stayed behind, written in stone and brick across the city's neighborhoods.
