c1890 ~ The stern-wheeler steamboat "Bessie," last of the Mifflin Kenedy-Richard King Rio Grande shipping fleet of the mid-1800s. Here she is loading up at Fort Ringgold en route to Brownsville.
Steamboats Big Part of Valley's Start
By Mell Huff
May 25, 2005 ~ The Brownsville Herald
The Corvette was one of Brownsvilles fastest ways to get around 150 years ago.
Built as a luxury Ohio River passenger liner, it transported Army VIPs up and down the Rio Grande River during the Mexican-American War, when the alternatives were horses, ox-drawn wagons and donkey carts.
The Corvette was part of a colorful steamboat industry that moved passengers and goods between Brownsville and Roma when the river was wide and deep enough to be navigated. For 70 years until the beginning of the 20th century steamboats played a crucial role in the early economic development of the Rio Grande Valley.
The riverboats moved troops to Camargo and military supplies to the Fort Ringgold barracks in Rio Grande City. They brought in tools and implements, building materials from New Orleans and manufactured goods from the East Coast pianos, mirrors and fancy clothing for women, including Belgian lace.
And because there were few farms in the Valley in the 1800s, they brought in foodstuffs coffee, sugar, fine wine, cheeses and sardines from Portugal, said Bob Vezzetti, a researcher for the Brownsville Historical Association.
The elite lived very, very well, Vezzetti noted.
The demand that drove the steamboat trade came from Mexico.
Monterrey had all the money, said Joseph P. Linck Jr., a river historian and the president of Global Stone, a materials importer. We were just service companies transporting their merchandise.
Manufactured goods went up the river bound for Mexico, and commodities like coins and animal hides came back down the river to Brownsville.
The exterior of the cow was worth more than the inside, Vezzetti said. People were wearing boots all over the country. They had horses and buggies and had to have accoutrements to attach them.
Bones were a major export, too, Vezzetti said. They were ground up for fertilizer and used for corset stays.
People also traveled on the Rio Grande.
Kids from Chihuahua and Monterrey would go to Veracruz, Havana and New Orleans to the university, and businessmen would travel for business purposes, Linck said. The riverboats occasionally had passenger cabins, but most passengers slept on the deck.
The reality of the day was everything went by water. Water was much more efficient than wagon trains. They (wagon trains) did 10 miles per day. A steamboat could cover five miles in a hour.
The Rio Grande steamboat trade began to develop after Mexicos independence from France in 1821, said Tony Knopp, history professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College.
At that point in the countrys history, well-to-do Mexicans didnt engage in trade, Knopp said. They engaged in politics, religion, the military and land-holding. Those were the respectable things to do. Trade was not respectable.
That left the field open to others.
The first steamboat traveled up the Rio Grande in 1828, according to Linck. It was operated by the Mexican Army. In 1828 or 1829 sources differ Henry Austin, a cousin of Stephen F. Austin, brought in a side-wheeler. But a frustrated Austin ran afoul of both the difficult river and the Mexican bureaucracy, and he left within a year.
The Rio Grandes current was faster than the Mississippis, and sandbars could form in weeks, Vezzetti said. Wide steamboats, such as Austins, had trouble navigating the unpredictable waters.
The large side-paddlers usually carried goods from the mouth of the Rio Grande only as far as Brownsville. Smaller sternwheelers transported merchandise from Brownsville farther up the river.
Steamboats could carry from 90 tons to more than 400 tons of cargo, Vezzetti said. They were flat-bottomed, so even when they were loaded they had only a two- to three-foot draft. (Draft is the depth to which a boat is submerged in water.)
The Corvette, which was about 135 feet long and 26 feet wide, had a draft of 20 inches unloaded and 30 inches when fully loaded, according to Texas A&M University nautical historians.
Riverboat operators contracted with ranchers at intervals along the Rio Grande to supply the mesquite they burned to make steam. They would just nose in and load up, Vezzetti said.
The trip from Brownsville to Camargo could take three days to a week, depending on the boat and river conditions, according to an article by C. M. Robinson III in a 1970 issue of the periodical Sea Classics.
Steamboat traffic started in earnest in 1846, when U.S. Gen. Zachary Taylor commissioned riverboats to transport troops to Camargo during the Mexican-American War. He planned to use Camargo, on the Mexican side of the river across from the present-day Rio Grande City, as a staging area for an invasion of Monterrey.
Taylor sent an agent north to bring back riverboats that were smaller and had shallower drafts than Mississippi steamboats.
One of them was the Corvette, according to Robinson. It reached the Rio Grande by traveling down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans and, from there, across the Gulf of Mexico. Its captain was Mifflin Kenedy and its pilot, Richard King. By August of 1846, there were 20 boats on the river, Robinson wrote.
When the war with Mexico ended in 1848, the boats were declared government surplus. Kenedy, King and two investors one of whom was Charles Stillman bought the boats, and Kenedy and King continued to operate them.
Stillman, a financier and developer, bought land and laid out the city of Brownsville in 1848. The same year, he entered into a partnership with a Swedish architect, John Vale, to plat the town of Roma, which at the time was little more than a ranching community. Stillman sold lots in both towns.
Across the river from Roma as far upriver as boats could reliably go lay Mier, once the largest settlements on the Rio Grande after Brownsville. A good road led from Ciudad Mier to Monterrey. At the time, there was no direct route to Monterrey from Matamoros.
(Roma) was a second Brownsville, said architect Manuel Hinojosa. It was almost like a port of entry for the interior of Mexico. Goods flowed to Zacatecas, Durango and Aguas Calientes areas hard to reach from the Mexican port of Veracruz.
Hinojosa manages local construction projects for the San Antonio firm of Kell Muoz Architects, which is currently restoring the historic buildings of Roma. Kell Muoz has also designed a number of buildings on the campus of the University of Texas at Brownsville, including the Life and Health Sciences building, the Regional Academic Health Centers School of Public Healthand the student union.
This was like a mall, Hinojosa said. You go to the mall and they have goods youve never seen before. They stock it. They store it. And people were just taking it by wagonloads into Mexico. And not just to Monterey, (but) to Saltillo, to Zacatecas, to Durango, to Aguas Calientes to the big cities of Mexico.
Roma and Brownsville, the bookends of the river trade, prospered in the post-war boom. More than 500 people lived in Roma in the 1850s; Brownsville had 10 times that many people. Camargo and Rio Grande City were eclipsed as commercial centers.
The key here is Charles Stillman, Knopp said. He controlled both ends (of the river commerce) and, by steamboats, everything in between.
Roma prospered even more during the Civil War after Brownsville fell into the hands of the Union. Goods continued to move through Roma because it was not guarded. Grocery stores, warehouses, confectioneries, and tanneries lined the streets. Wagons came in, supplies were unloaded, horses watered.
Some 200 steamboats traveled the river during the seven decades when the Rio Grande was an expressway to Mexico. But notes on an undated list of steamers provided by the Brownsville Historical Association indicate the vessels had a high mortality rate.
Exploded at Camargo. Collapsed a flue. Wrecked off mouth of river, total loss. Sank below Reynosa on first trip, some captions read.
Kenedy and King turned to ranching and dissolved their steamship company in 1874. The Corvette, the steamer that they piloted to Brownsville, still lies in the river about 500 yards west of Gateway International Bridge, although some historians believe it could be a different ship.
The river was busy with trade through the 1880s, but river commerce began to drop off by 1890. In 1904, the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway reached Brownsville and steamboats ceased to run trains could take goods straight to Reynosa and from there to Monterrey.
The railroads bypassed Roma, and with the loss of river commerce, Brownsvilles counterpart declined.
The buildings were completely abandoned, Hinojosa said. The doors were out. You could walk into the buildings. Thats probably what saved this architecture.
THE BESSIE
Three views of the "Bessie," the last of the Rio Granderiver steamboats. It was brought into the Rio Grande about the year 1884, and operated until 1903 when it was tied up at the Brownsville landing after its last trip to Ringgold Barracks at Rio Grande City. It remained there. gradually sinking, until it was completely covered over with silt deposits from river floods.
It was owned by the Merchants Steamboat Co successors to the King and Kenedy Co.
~ Typewritten by A.A. Champion - Brownsville Historian
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