Editor’s Note: This is the first of two Back Then columns on the history of steamboating in Western North Carolina.

Commercial steamboating began with Robert Fulton’s successful jaunt from New York City to Albany in 1807, the first voyage of any notable distance made by a steamboat. Thereafter, for most of the 19th century, steamboating became a significant transportation factor wherever there were navigable waters. Many rivers like the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, Cumberland, Tennessee, etc., were obviously suitable, but what about rivers like the French Broad and the Little Tennessee here in the mountains of Western North Carolina?

Numerous records indicate that both were heavily used where they broadened, deepened, and emptied into the Tennessee River in eastern Tennessee. Here in the mountainous interior of the Southern Blue Ridge Province, however, I can locate documentation for but two steamboats. Both had wonderfully evocative names and each had an interesting story attached to its ventures.

This week we’ll take a look at The Mountain Lily, which during the early 1880s plied the waters of the upper French Broad in Henderson County. Next week we’ll turn our attention to The Vivian which, starting in 1919, serviced an impounded stretch of the Little Tennessee as a tugboat ferrying lumber barges on Cheoah Reservoir in Graham and Swain counties.

About 1875, a bill was initiated by North Carolina congressman Robert V. Vance for $25,000 “to clear and deepen” the channel of the upper French Broad River so that it would be navigable. Vance had been influenced to do so by several influential Western North Carolina businessmen. The prime instigator was Colonel Sidney Vance Pickens, an Asheville native who had settled down in Hendersonville after the Civil War. Once the river had supposedly been rendered navigable by the Corps of Army Engineers, Pickens chartered the French Broad Steamboat Line into existence in 1880 “to carry freight and passengers and if necessary the United States mail” between Asheville and Brevard.

Pickens purchase a plot of land for a boathouse at Horse Shoe, a small settlement situated about 20 miles south of Asheville, about five miles northwest of Hendersonville, and about 15 miles northeast of Brevard. In the spring of 1881, touting the venture as “The Highest Steamboat Line in America” — one that would ensure prosperity throughout the region — Pickens had no difficulty in immediately raising the corporation’s capital stock (at the rate of $25 for each of the 160 shares proffered) at an all-day picnic at which alcoholic beverages were optional.

By August of that year, construction of a mighty steamboat had been completed on the site. To local folks who had never seen anything larger than a canoe or rowboat, it was something to behold: 90 feet long; two decks high; two paddlewheels amidships powered by dual engines with a total capacity of 12 horsepower each; staterooms to accommodate 100 passengers; space enough below decks to haul large quantities of freight and mail; and all spruced up with a glistening coat of white paint trimmed in green.

One hundred invited guests attended the ceremonial launching. A brass band played as the chocks were knocked out from under the boat. And as it slid slowly down the bank into the river, a woman described as “a pretty mountain girl” smashed a large bottle of fine champagne against the hull, declaring for all to hear: “I christen thee, The Mountain Lily!” Shortly thereafter, the air over the mountains was filled for the first time with the deep-throated whistle of a steamboat. In retrospect, some of the attendees recalled — perhaps without too much exaggeration — that “horses and cows grazing along the river banks suddenly raised their heads, gazed a moment in the direction from whence came the strange, unaccustomed sound, and then whirled and dashed headlong in flight.”

It was a grand occasion. But, alas, Pickens had not planned his venture well. Some of the jetties constructed along the banks by the Army Corps of Engineers to deepen the channels made the river too narrow for The Mountain Lily to pass through. Downstream from Horse Shoe toward Hendersonville, the old Kings Bridge over which the Mill River Road passed was two low to allow the steamboat to pass underneath. She was hemmed in by bad planning, able only to range the 15-mile stretch of the French Broad between Penrose (southwest of Horse Shoe) and the Kings Bridge (northeast of Horse Shoe).

Instead of hauling freight, passengers, and mail to Asheville, the oversized steamboat was reduced to cruising slowly up and down the river between Penrose and the Kings Bridge, hosting midnight dances and parties of various sorts. The company was not a success, never showing a profit.

Then came disaster. A flash flood in 1885 pulled The Mountain Lily from her moorings. Floating unattended downstream, she mired down in a sand bar just upstream from Kings Bridge. Some of the remains were said to still be visible during low water stages of the French Broad into the mid-1950s.

A short while after this incident, the engines were dismantled, refurbished, and used to operate sawmills in Henderson and Transylvania counties. Lumber salvaged from the dock and steamboat was used to build the Riverside Baptist Church at Horse Shoe. The Mountain Lily’s bell was hung in the new church’s belfry, where, according to one old-time member, it “called the people of the area to worship in sweet ringing tones.”

Sources: John Parris, Mountain Bred (1967); Frank L. FitzSimons From the Banks of the Oklawaha (1976); and Henry G. Pettitt, The Saga of Mountain Lily in “Steamboat Bill” (Spring 1993), pp. 35-37

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.