The Belle of Louisville: Oldest Steamboat Still Breathing Steam
Near Louisville, Kentucky
She was built in Pittsburgh in nineteen fourteen, before the first World War changed everything, and she is still making steam on the Ohio River today. The Belle of Louisville is the oldest operating Mississippi River-style steamboat in the world, a vessel that has outlived entire eras of American history without stopping.
She started life as the Idlewild, a day packet designed to haul freight and passengers, with a steel hull that drew only five feet of water, shallow enough to travel almost any navigable inland waterway in the country. She worked as a ferry between Memphis and West Memphis for years, then changed hands and changed names, becoming the Avalon in nineteen forty-seven, wandering the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Cumberland, and Kanawha Rivers, earning a reputation as the most widely traveled river steamboat in the nation.
In nineteen sixty-two, Jefferson County Judge Marlow Cook bought her for thirty-four thousand dollars and gave her a new name: the Belle of Louisville. The city had saved a piece of river history.
The Belle became famous for a different reason when the Great Steamboat Race began in nineteen sixty-three, an annual contest pitting the Belle against the Delta Queen, run on the Ohio between Louisville and Jeffersonville, Indiana, held each year on the Wednesday before the Kentucky Derby. For decades the two boats traded victories. The Belle won twenty-seven times; the Delta Queen won twenty. When the Delta Queen was sidelined after two thousand nine, other challengers took her place, but the tradition continues.
The Belle was named a National Historic Landmark in nineteen eighty-nine. She has carried more than seven million passengers since her launch, running on steam the same way she always has.
