Old Steamboat Days on The Hudson River
By: David Lear Buckman, The Grafton Press, 1907

CHAPTER 8

Fast Time on the River

Each succeeding steamer cut down the time of the passage. In 1817 it had been reduced to eighteen hours and in 1826 the Constellation and Constitution had made the trip to Albany in fifteen hours. By 1836 a new boat, the North America, had cut it down to ten hours and the improvement went steadily on until the Chauncey Vibbard, in 1864, made it in an even seven hours, beginning and finishing the trip in daylight, which had long been the ambition of the steamboat captains. Now the new Hendrik Hudson of the Day Line leaves New York at 8.30 A. M., makes nine landings, arrives at Albany at 5.30 with the regularity of a railroad time table and could, if pushed, do a great deal better.

The improvement in time will be readily appreciated by the appended statement of the performances of the old-timers on the run to Albany:

	hours	minutes
1807 Clermont	32	—
1817 Chancellor Livingston	18	—
1826 Constellation	15	—
1836 North America	10	—
1849 Alida	7	45
1851 New World	7	43
1852 Francis Skiddy	7	30
1860 Armenia	7	42
1862 Daniel Drew	6	50
1864 Chauncey Vibbard	6	42

The Mary Powell, built in 1861, many times reconstructed and improved and still running, was for years conceded to be the queen of the river steamers in point of speed. She averages twenty miles an hour at all times, and has been pushed to twenty-six miles.

In 1884, the steam yacht Stilletto, built entirely for speed and fresh from the hands of her builders, the Herreshoffs of Bristol, R. I., tried to wrest the laurels from the old boat and succeeded by a narrow margin. On June 10th in a race of thirty miles she beat the Powell by two miles, covering the distance in one hour and fifteen minutes. It was not a bad showing, however, for the old river queen and her owners have always claimed she could have done much better had she been put into first class condition for the race. Similar claims were made for the Stilletto, her builders claiming twenty-seven miles an hour for their boat. The Stilletto set low in the water so as to present as little surface for wind resistance as possible. She was somewhat of the same type as the Vamoose, another boat built for speed in later years. Both were the forerunners in a degree of the motor boats now so popular.

This special form of construction bad been attempted, however, many years before. Burden built a cigarshaped boat which he called Helen. Though it was expected she would be very speedy, she turned out a failure and was soon abandoned.

In the attempt to turn out fast boats and cut down the time of the river, some boats with four smokestacks and as many boilers, with two engines and two walking beams were built. The Erie and Champlain were four pipers,” but they did not realize the expectations of their builders. Even at this late date the Albany and New York of the Day Line only boast of three smokestacks. The improvement in speed has been secured with more perfectly constructed machinery and feathering paddle wheels, than anything else.

The old captains were frequently given to speeding their boats, and many tales are told in the pilot houses and engine rooms to this day of the old craft that made sprints in order to hold the record of the smartest boat on the river.

When Hudson River captains raced their boats they did it for all they were worth. Trips that could be made with eighteen cords of wood and twenty-five pounds of steam, would call for twenty-five cords of wood and sixty pounds of steam, if the other boat was a good one and the race was at all close. The steam gauges were plugged and the safety valves were weighted down so that the boiler pressure frequently became threefold what it should be.

In the fall of 1886, the Swallow and the Rochester had a memorable race, starting from Jersey City at 4 P. M., November 8th, and it was a hot one. The boats were within a short distance from each other all the way up the river, with the tide against them. The Swallow’s engine became disabled near Hudson and she slowed down for a few moments and then dashed ahead again, but the Rochester reached the Overslaugh Bar, five miles below Albany, first, in eight hours and fifty-seven minutes, and the Swallow in nine hours and two minutes, just five minutes behind her rival. Though the race was the Rochester’s it was generally admitted that the Swallow was the better boat.

The North America and the Champlain were always in for a race whenever their sailing hours permitted of it, and each boat had its enthusiastic backers, for the passengers generally became as much interested in these river contests, as the captains themselves.

The Columbia, a new boat, made her appearance in 1849 and immediately demonstrated to the older craft on the river, she was to be reckoned with. Her spurts with the North America were among the exciting brushes of the period and she crowded the older boat to the rear, making the run to Hudson, where she belonged, in eight hours and a quarter.

The Kosciusko and Telegraph were always pushing one another for the record. Many times they tried conclusions and when a race between the two was on, it mattered not if a score or more passengers were waiting at one of the announced landings, the boats rushed by, leaving the hapless people on the dock, so great was the rivalry between the two captains. The Telegraph eventually proved the better boat and kept the record until a newer vessel sent the old speeder to the rear.

The rivalry for the speed record became so great between two of the boats, the Oregon, owned by George Law, and the Cornelius Vanderbilt, owned by “Commodore” Vanderbilt, then running on Long Island Sound, that a race for $1,000 a side was arranged between them, which took place on the Hudson River on June 1, 1847. The Vanderbilt was a new boat. The race started at the Battery and both boats got away at eleven o’clock, a great throng of people being on hand to witness the contest. For thirty miles up the river the boats kept side by side, but the Oregon passed the Vanderbilt as she approached the stake boat off Ossining and was half a length ahead at that point. In passing the Vanderbilt, the Oregon was bumped by her rival and damaged her wheelhouse considerably.

On the way down the river the Oregon’s coal gave out, but the captain and crew resorted to tactics that had been followed before, in the days of exciting steamboat racing. The woodwork of the berths, chairs, benches, furniture of staterooms and everything else that would burn was put under the boilers to keep up steam. She finished the race at the Battery about twelve hundred feet ahead of the Vanderbilt, having covered the seventy miles in three hours and fifteen minutes with the tide against her going north and with her on the return. The owners of the Oregon got the $1,000 stake and possibly expended more than that restoring the joiner work on their boat.

The Alida and the Hendrik Hudson had a great race from New York to Albany in 1849. The first named reached Albany at 2.55 P. M., having left New York at 7.00 A. M., made one landing and beat the Hudson by fifteen minutes, both boats having an ebb tide all the way up the river.

Captain DeGroot of the Reindeer would never admit there was a boat on the river that could pass him and he was frequently called upon to prove it, which be did to the discomfiture of his rivals. The Henry Clay was designed to beat her, but never did. The New World, with her enormous piston stroke of fifteen feet which has never been equaled, though fourteen feet strokes were not uncommon, was thought to be a match for the Reindeer, and she proved to be, though Captain DeGroot would never admit it, always claiming something went wrong with the machinery when he found the other boat was pulling away from him.

The St. John wrested the laurels from the Vanderbilt in 1863 and in the same year the new day boat Chauncey Vibbard made Albany in seven and a half hours, which she cut down the year following to six hours and forty- two minutes.

Steamboat racing on the Hudson virtually came to art end in 1852, when the Steamboat Inspection Bill, passed by Congress, became a law. It was well racing was made unlawful, for it had developed recklessness and a disregard for the safety and convenience of passengers. Then, too, bursting boilers were of too frequent occurrence and there was good reason, though we are apt to smile at their fears with our experience in new and improved mechanical devices—for sensible people to prefer traveling on “safety barges” having the benefit of steam propulsion without sleeping above an overtaxed boiler.

The fear of bursting boilers was the one uppermost in the minds of the early steamboat travelers. An incident will illustrate the promptness with which the boat owners met all objections:

The steamboat New London was advertised to leave that part of the pier opposite the Eagle Tavern, Albany, for New York, one afternoon at 4 o’clock. A prejudice existed at the time against iron boilers, which were thought to be unsafe. It was, therefore, advertised that the New London had a copper boiler, an overnight transformation said to have been accomplished by a liberal application of copper colored paint.

The steamboats in their day tried to do what the telegraph does for the newspapers to-day. In 1829 we read that the President’s Message which was sent to Congress on Tuesday, December 8th, reached New York fifteen and one-half hours afterward and was rushed up the river on the steamer Albany and arrived at that city in time to be published on Thursday morning, which was an event considered to have been one of “unprecedented dispatch.”

It will certainly pay you the next time you journey up the river to take note of the long low embankment extending out in the water, nearly a mile from the shore, at the point where the Palisades suddenly terminate as if cut down by some mighty hand. The narrow strip of land looks more like a breakwater than anything else, and close observation will show it is sadly in need of repair. It is now more of an obstruction to navigation than anything else, and should have been removed long ago.

The place is Piermont and it is the “pier" that extends such a great distance out in the river. The “mont’, or “mount” is at the shore end of the pier and if you have a pair of marine glasses with you, on looking well up on the hillside you will find a large yellow building that was once a hotel. Both the pier and the hotel are the silent witnesses of the busy, bustling times that once marked the place, but now long since gone.

Piermont was the eastern terminal in those days, of the Erie Railway and was the nearest possible point the road could get to New York City. The New Jersey State line reaches down to the Hudson about two miles south of Piermont. About the last place you can note in New York State below Piermont is Snedens Landing, a point of interest, however, for General Cornwallis landed there with six thousand British troops in 1776 and marched on Fort Lee further down on the Palisades.

When the Erie Railroad was built under a New York charter, New Jersey put up the bars against the new railway entering that State.

It was the talk those days that the old Camden and Amboy road controlled the entire railroad situation in New Jersey. It was certainly a powerful combination, which has since become incorporated in the Pennsylvania Railroad system. At any rate, it was powerful enough to make the Erie get to New York by way of Piermont. This was the reason the long pier was built; tracks laid upon it and the passenger trains run out to a steamboat ferry landing. From this point all the passengers were carried to New York City by steamboats and the railroad attempted to overcome the serious handicap, by making the trips between Piermont and the city in the shortest time possible. The freight was lightened down the river.

It can readily be imagined what a scene of busy activity the old pier must have been in times past, though one will look in vain for any signs of life there now, with the exception of a few manufactories that have located at the shore end of the pier. The Piermont branch of the Erie is still in existence, and freight cars are brought down the steep grades to the river level at that point for the benefit of local shippers.

The old hotel on the hillside has been a school, a conservatory of music and a boarding-house since the busy days when it was a popular hostelry at which fashionable New Yorkers bound west stopped over night, so as to take the first morning trains, without being forced to leave the city at an inconveniently early hour on the Eric’s fast steamboat express ferry from the foot of Duane Street.

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