The Belle of Louisville

The steamboat you can see from the waterfront here was built in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in nineteen fourteen. It was designed as a ferry and day packet, a working vessel that moved freight and passengers along the river. It was not built to be a museum piece. It had no idea it would still be running more than a hundred years later.

She was launched as the Idlewild and spent her early decades doing ordinary river work on the Ohio and Mississippi. In nineteen forty-seven she was renamed Avalon, after the death-bed wish of a beloved long-time captain named Ben Winters. She was already an old boat by then, an antique by the standards of river commerce, kept going by owners who loved her.

In nineteen sixty-two, Jefferson County Judge Marlow Cook purchased the steamer for thirty-four thousand dollars with the idea of reconnecting Louisville to its river heritage. The city rechristened her the Belle of Louisville. She was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-two and named a National Historic Landmark in nineteen eighty-nine. She is the oldest operating Mississippi River-style steamboat in the world.

What makes her unusual is the design she represents. The flat-bottomed, sternwheel paddle steamboat was the vehicle that opened the interior of the continent. It could navigate rivers too shallow for ocean-going vessels, carry enormous loads, and run on readily available wood fuel. Thousands of them worked the Ohio, the Mississippi, and their tributaries through the nineteenth century. The Belle of Louisville is the last of her kind still moving under her own steam.

When she blows her whistle in the harbor, the sound carries across the waterfront the way it did when Louisville was the gateway to the west.