Metro Jacksonville

The Steamships of Jacksonville

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Metro Jacksonville takes a look at an industry that once gave downtown Jacksonville's waterfront an international and cosmopolitan flair: The Steamships of Jacksonville.

Full Article
http://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2012-jul-the-steamships-of-jacksonville

Love the history. Thank you Dan and Ennis.

Your last paragraph captures it. "As the Mayor's office prepares to decide the FUTURE of Jacksonville's waterfront, considerable thought needs to be given to uses that can become economic anchors for a 21st century central business district."

I must say that Mayor Brown is making Downtown a Destination and not a pass through. After Friday's 6/29/12 press conference at Tillie Fowler Regional Park and his newest initiative People and Parks connection where it was announced that the newest kayak launch at Catherine St. On Hogans Creek is ready to go. Congratulations to Dave Roman and Mayor Brown.

All we need to do now is FIND FIND.

The future of Jacksonville's waterfront especially with the looming Govt. takeover of Downtown by another Authority that has been approved by city council but now the boundaries of this Authority are up for a decision and a vote. The Public Trust has been totally destroyed in the past. Shipyards III. The recent news conference at Tillie Fowler Regional Park and the rejuvenated effort of Dave Roman and Mayor Brown along with the commissioners of FIND should have us all saying "VISIT JACKSONVILLE"

It will only happen with legislation.

So who wants to kayak at the brand new kayak launch at Catherine St. In Springfield on Hogans Creek?

Congratulations to Mayor Brown and Dave Roman.

Who's next?

What a coincidence! I'm headed to New Orleans to ride the Natchez paddleboat this weekend. I love the old Jacksonville steamboats. The "City of Sanford" steamship caught fire just across the river from Ortega with many dead:
http://www.cowart.info/Florida%20History/Cityof%20Sanford/Burning%20wheel,%20City%20of%20Sanford.htm (http://www.cowart.info/Florida%20History/Cityof%20Sanford/Burning%20wheel,%20City%20of%20Sanford.htm). Very tragic. It's amazing it didn't happen more often. Before electricity, I believe the ships would just have huge bonfires burning on the front of the boat for night travel.

Look how ornate some of them were inside. Very cool. Too bad we don't build with that type of craftsmanship anymore.

They do look very well appointed.  I'm sure due to their smaller size that a choppy Atlantic could have made many people with motion sickness a little ill, but what a way to travel!

Wish Jacksonville's waterfront could have at least a scrap yard of these ships.  I work on a project in Alameda, CA and in Alameda there is a former naval shipyard filled with old ships.  It's a pretty cool sight, even from a distance.  Philly has a ton of old ships sitting at the docks, too.

(http://prints.encore-editions.com/500/0/silver-springs-on-the-ocklawaha-sic-florida.jpg)

None of this is new, as Jacksonville stumbles around trying to figure this out I offer this photo of a vibrant intermodal terminal circa 1920. The location is the steamboat wharf at Silver Springs. The steamer 'Metamora,' of The Lucas New Line is docked at the head of the springs, a tour boat awaits a fresh load of visitors, and in the background 'The Silver Springs Special' of the Ocklawaha Valley Railroad (you were expecting anything less?) is mixing it up with the nautical world.

In another generation the Metamora would slowly sink into the dark waters of the St. Johns at it's Palatka wharf only to be pumped out and moved to a common graveyard of many of our riverboats just south of the town. The boats were visible well into the 1950's-70's, even today low water exposes machinery and giant timbers from this era.


If city planning, the mayor, DIA, etc... could wrap their collective heads around a concept of a smaller (think something about the size of a two floor c-store) ship terminal on our river walk. Within that terminal, we house a 'Visit Jacksonville' center, and an official Florida marine welcome station. A small theater room could show the historic films shot in Jacksonville as well as those used in Fort Caroline and/or St. Augustine by the National Park Service. Free OJ or coffee. Leave space for a couple of full time small concessions within the building. Add DVI, and seasonal Park Service people to the mix, and SELL THIS CITY as the WORLDS BEST SMALL SHIP CRUISE PORT.

An interesting article I found:

Quote
By The Times-Union

Wednesday, August 27, 1997

Derelict steamboat more than a wreck

By Bill Foley

Columnist

Is anything more annoying than the disappearance of the ubiquitous?

Through much of my childhood, a derelict steamboat lay broken and sagging in the Intracoastal Waterway at Atlantic Boulevard.

It was gussied up with gingerbread siding and had a big sign on it that said ''Showboat,'' but it really was nothing more even to my undiscerning childish eye than a rotting wreck.

But it was a neighborhood wreck, and every time we drove to town - town being Jacksonville - the old Showboat was there as sure as the canal was there - that's what the Intracoastal Waterway was called before Elvis or the moonshot or whatever benchmark in time marked its transition in popular parlance from ''canal'' to ''Intracoastal Waterway'' or ''The ICW'' if you live at the Beaches and are truly hip, if that's what they call it anymore.

Anyway, the Showboat was part of the landscape as much as the sea oats and Jimmy Johnson's fish camp and Harry Blitch's restaurant and the dinky little drawbridge from which the locals fished over the side, buckets strewed into the path of beach-bound traffic, daring the townies to run them down.

None of it is there anymore, of course.

Highway construction claimed the sea oats, and Jimmy Johnson and Harry Blitch have long since made the hereafter a little more colorful. The dinky little drawbridge has been replaced by a real swooper from which no one would fish, even if anybody fished anymore in the canal - oops, The ICW.

But I have no idea what became of the Showboat.

I am sure it passed ingloriously, sucked up from the mud and cut and chopped and whacked to shreds, its remnants carted off to a landfill or dumped in the sea or whatever. I don't remember it happening, though, and I didn't see anything in the paper about it. Just one day it was gone and nobody who never saw it ever heard anything about it, and anybody who ever saw it surely remembers it well - an eyesore that became a landmark.

It was, of course, once famous.

The derelict once was The City of Jacksonville, proud queen, they called it, of the St. Johns River. It was built to the order of the DeBary Line in Wilmington, Del., in 1882, especially for service on the St. Johns River. With its sister steamer the Frederick DeBary, it plied thrice weekly between Jacksonville and Sanford, in time becoming known as the most traveled steamer on the St. Johns River.

In the 1890s, the Clyde St. Johns River Line took over the City of Jacksonville and the Frederick DeBary and began daily runs with passengers, mail and express traffic between Jacksonville and Palatka. In 1914, the DeBary was replaced by the Osceola, which coincidentally ended up as a derelict imbedded at the foot of the present Jacksonville City Hall, a circumstance of which city fathers were innocent until they tried to build a parking lot.

The City of Jacksonville and the Osceola both ended their runs in 1928. Other forms of transportation had made the river craft obsolete. Investors from Savannah considered making the City of Jacksonville an excursion boat, but it didn't work out. The engines were taken out and, with the end of Prohibition, the City of Jacksonville became a nightclub, a restaurant, a private club, all the stuff that hot spots along the canal fail at, unless they are run by Harry Blitch.

The Florida Times-Union described the old derelict in 1949 as bearing ''the rusty scars of a hard life . . . a little apologetic in her condition.''

And thus I remember it until it was gone, I know not where.

And a picture of her sometime in the 50's:

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