| Bardstown Resident Is Actual Inventor of Steamboat
By BERRY CRAIG - For The Associated Press |
| BARDSTOWN, Ky. (AP) It was said that when John Fitch sat pondering the Ohio River in 1780, his thoughts drifted halfway around the world. |
| Fitch remembered inventor James Watt, whose newfangled steam engine was powering the infant industrial revolution in Great Britain, according to Lewis and Richard Collins' old ``History of Kentucky.'' Fitch thus ``concluded that he could propel boats by the same power.'' |
| Even so, most history books credit Robert Fulton with the steamboat, not John Fitch, whose final resting place is on the courthouse square in historic old Bardstown, the Nelson County seat. |
| Bardstown historian David H. Hall is happy to set the record straight. ``Fulton built the first commercially successful steamboat. Fitch built the first working steamboat.'' |
| In 1798, Fitch died almost penniless in Bardstown. In 1927, he was reburied
beneath a tall, two-columned gray marble monument the U.S. Congress erected
in his honor. The memorial is flanked by a wooden replica of a Fitch
steamboat that had plied the Delaware River in the 1780s Ï two decades
before Fulton's famous Clermont chugged along the Hudson River.
``Fulton was the master improver,'' Hall said. ``He took Fitch's idea and made it better.'' |
| A Connecticut Yankee, Fitch had fought early in the Revolutionary War.
After resigning from the Continental Army and divorcing his wife, he
crossed the Appalachian mountains into the Kentucky backwoods as a surveyor.
Fitch staked out a large tract of land for himself in Nelson County, then trekked to the Ohio River. ``In June, 1780, while sitting upon the bank ... the thought forced itself upon him that a good God had not provided such a magnificent stream without designing it for use of his creatures, and that such involved the overcoming its currents by a new mode of navigation,'' the Collins' book explained. |
| Back East, Fitch sought government help for his steamboat. In 1791, Congress granted him a patent, but no money. The national legislature lacked ``the foresight to realize that Fitch's invention could make rivers the highways of the West,'' Dixie Hibbs, another Bardstown historian, wrote in ``The Kentucky Encyclopedia.'' |
| The legislatures of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware also declined to help fund Fitch's project, Hibbs added. Instead, they granted him ``exclusive privileges to navigate certain waters by boats propelled by fire or steam,'' the book said. |
| In the late 1780s, Fitch raised enough money from private backers to build
several small steam-powered boats on the Delaware River around
Philadelphia. One vessel reached a speed of 7« miles an hour, according to
the Collins book.
But mechanical troubles plagued Fitch's boats. Investors abandoned him. A despairing Fitch wrote, ``The day will come when some more powerful man will get fame and riches from my invention; but nobody will believe that poor John Fitch can do any thing worthy of attention.'' |
| In the 1790s, Fitch looked for financial support in Europe. Finding none, he returned to America and decided to live on his Kentucky lands. |
| Fitch planned to build a steamboat company in the West, Hibbs wrote. But
when he arrived in Nelson County, he discovered that others had claimed his
land. Fitch tried to win his land back in court. But long, expensive legal
battles left him more despondent. ``His mind and body gradually gave way
under despair, and he sought relief in habitual intoxication,'' the book
said.
Fitch finally managed to recover 300 acres near Bardstown. His meager purse almost emptied by attorney's fees, Fitch struck a bargain with tavern keeper Alexander McCoun. Fitch promised McCoun 150 acres ``if he would board him while he lived, and allow him a pint of spirits each day!'' the book said. ``He afterwards increased the quantity of land, on condition of an increase in liquor!'' |
| Fitch was only 55 when he died in 1798. He was buried unceremoniously in Bardstown's Pioneer Cemetery. |
| ``I know of nothing so perplexing and vexatious as a turbulent wife and steamboat building,'' he prefaced his meager will. ``I experienced the former and quit in season, and had I been in my right senses I should undoubtedly have treated the latter in the same manner, but for one man to be teased with both, he must be looked upon as the most unfortunate man of the world.'' |
Another link to John Fitch and his steamboat