Paddlewheels Ahoy! Archaeology of the Oldest Existing Steam Propulsion System

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Phoenix (1814-1819) is the earliest archaeologically-studied steamboat, built just 8 years after America’s first commercially-successful steamer, North River. Phoenix operated for five seasons until it suddenly burned and sank in Lake Champlain, Vermont, in September 1819. In the 2010s, the hull was documented and studied by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) and the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum (LCMM), but no sign of the paddlewheels were found. Then, in September 2020, lake surveyor Gary Lefebvre encountered two large half-buried disks 3/4 of a mile from the Phoenix wreck site. The current INA – LCMM project is documenting these disarticulated paddlewheels and studying their connection to Phoenix. These remains are believed to be the earliest-known paddlewheels in existence and represent a technology that ushered in a worldwide transportation revolution. The project aims to integrate the research results into the hull reconstruction and expand our limited knowledge of early steam propulsion technology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2023 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow