OHIO STATEWIDE FILES - Know your Ohio:  The Walk-in-the Water- No 2
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by
Darlene E. Kelley
http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374
May 30, 1999
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Historical Collections of Ohio
The Kelley Family Collections
Newspaper Article, Plains Dealer
compiled by S.J. Kelley  1925
And Then They Went West
by Darlene E.Kelley  1998
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     ( Recently I saw a picture of an early Lake Erie Steamer, named the
Walk-in- the-Water.  Can you tell me something of the history? S.E.D.
---Cleveland. )
                                                            
    The Walk-in-the Water was the first Steamship on Lake Erie.  She was
built at Black Rock, below Buffalo, and launched on May 28, 1818.
     The vessel's engines were not very powerful, and an interesting
account of the method by which she was gotten up-river from the place of
her of launching to Buffalo, which became her home port, is given by
Eber D. Howe of Painsville in his " Autobiography of a Pioneer Printer."
     " I was present at Black Rock at the launching," he wrote. " At
this time there was no harbor at Buffalo of sufficient depth of water
for a craft of that size, and owing to the crude manner of constructing
engines at that time, she had great difficulty in getting up the river
into the lake; she was obliged to wait for a ' horn breeze,' as sailors
term it, and hitch on eight or ten pairs of oxen by means of a long rope
or cable, and together with all the steam she could raise, she was able
to make the ascent.  Sometimes the cable would break and the craft float
back to the place whence she started."
      But the craft did get out into the lake.   She made seven trips to
Detroit in her first season, each of nine or ten days, traveling eight
or ten miles an hour.  She had a tonnage of about 300 and could
accommodate more than a hundred passengers.
     Cleveland got a look at the Walk-in-the Water on August 25,1818,
two days out of Buffalo on her maiden voyage.  The city greeted the
vessel and Capt Job Fish, once an Engineer for Robert Fulton, with a
round of Artillery.  Several prominent citizens gave more convincing
evidence of faith in her by taking passage to Detroit.
     The Cleaveland Register observered editorially that " the facility
with which she moves over our lakes warrants us in saying she will be of
utility, not only to the proprietors, but also to the public. She
affords us a safe, sure and speedy conveyance of all our surplus
products to distant markets.  She works well in a storm as any vessel on
the lakes and answers the most daring expectations of the proprietors."
     The latter sentence seems not to have been entirely justified in
view of later events.  The Walk-in-the-Water ran sucessfully through the
seasons of 1819 and 1820, and up to November, 1821.  In that month a
gale overtook her near Buffalo and she was driven ashore on a sand
beach.  Passengers and crew escaped with a drenching and the loss of
baggage, but the first steamer of the lake was damaged beyond salvage.
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