Part I of II
By Bill Burk
Steamboat service on Chautauqua Lake began as early as 1828. By the 1870s, it had grown into a regular, reliable system of travel, a transportation corridor before it was a recreation and entertainment resource; that designation began in the 1890’s when Celoron became “the Coney Island of Chautauqua”.
The lake WAS the highway in 1871. Roads from Jamestown to Bemus or Stow, on to Mayville, were rutted dirt horse-paths. If you wanted to move any significant quantity of livestock, mail, food, timber, or people, you did it on boats like the City of Buffalo, City of Chicago, City of New York, and City of Erie. Competition was fierce, and companies often upgraded engines, cabins, and décor to attract passengers. Consistency, timely delivery of patrons, keeping to a schedule was important to the lines.
A man steps out of an Atlantic & Great Western Railroad passenger car at the station in Falconer, New York. In 1871, travelers going from Buffalo to Jamestown, ride the “A&GW” on a broad-gauge six-foot line, the only through service connecting Buffalo to the southwest most corner of New York (Buffalo to Hamburg to Gowanda to Dayton to Conewango to Kennedy, to Falconer).
Service on the Buffalo & Jamestown Railroad won’t reach into Jamestown until 1875. Freight interchange that far is limited because of the gauge mismatch, lines going into Jamestown are smaller at 4 foot 8 1/2 inches.
The man hails a carriage to Burtis Bay, named for settler Joseph Burtis -later the area is called Prendergast Point, eventually named Celoron when the city is incorporated in 1896.
Despite temperatures near ninety degrees, he wears the dark frock coat and light patterned waistcoat of a traveling gentleman, checked trousers with suspenders. He tips his bowler cap to the ladies, checks his pocket watch and hurries to the docks. There he pays his thirty-five cents (an extra five cents for his traveling trunk) and boards the Steamer Chautauqua for a refreshing ride to the upper basin of the lake where he has a farming interest.
The sixteen-foot paddles of the side-wheeler steamer (twelve, five-foot tall buckets built into each) engage and the Steamer Chautauqua lurches forward, churning up soot and weeds from the shallow Chadakoin inlet.
A sixteen-foot wheel on a 120-foot boat is proportionally large, nearly 14% of the vessel’s total length. That size gives the Steamer Chautauqua strong thrust to handle the lake’s shallow, weedy conditions, and good maneuverability for short hops between landings.
It also puts a considerable burden on the boiler that powers the boat.
A young man climbs to the main deck to get some air. He’s just finished feeding the boiler, third load of wood in the last half-hour on orders from the captain. This captain likes speed, likes being ahead of schedule.
It’s too much wood in the young man’s opinion, runs the boiler too hot, but he isn’t about to contradict the captain, this only his second week on the job as boilerman on The Steamer Chautauqua.
The Steamer Chautauqua was retrofitted the beginning of summer, 1871, when the Chautauqua Paddle Wheel Company took ownership of her. New paint, new benches for passengers, a new hurricane deck, and a new boiler. New boilers need to be broken in, tested against the haul of the paddle in different conditions, heat levels meticulously maintained and monitored to see how the steamboat reacts and responds. The new boiler on The Steamer Chautauqua is no exception.
Except with the summer season here there’s money to be made, people need transportation up and down Chautauqua Lake. They can’t wait -won’t wait- for a boiler to be tested. Sometimes, those concerns outweighed safety protocols, and that could prove to be catastrophic.
As the young, inexperienced (cheap summer labor), boiler boy stands on the deck, sucking in the humid August air, something is happening three decks below.