Steamboats to railroads a long leap

The steamboat opened the Teche and helped bring prosperity to the communities alongside it, but by the middle 1800s the romance of a ride on a steamer began to be challenged by pragmatic leaders who argued in behalf of the speed and relative dependability of the railroad.

The editor of The Planters’ Banner, one of the best read newspapers in the Attakapas district in 1850, plainly thought it was time for businessmen to push for a railroad through the area.

In those days, boats followed two principal routes from New Orleans to St. Martinville. The “inner route” followed inland waterways – Bayou Plaquemine, the Atchafalaya River, Bayou Teche – but only during the months when the water was high. The rest of the year boats had to take an “outer route” through the shallow waters of the Gulf – something not all of them were equipped to handle.

The editor thought there had to be a better way, asking rhetorically in January 1850, “Do our enterprising and public spirited citizens believe that we shall, for a century to come, be obliged to take the circuitous route which our steamboats now take? How stupid is the idea that [our] citizens … will continue to … travel more than two hundred miles during three months of the year to reach New Orleans, and more than four hundred miles the balance of the year?”

The editor reminded his readers that the trip was not only unnecessarily long, but that it was filled with dangers. Sunken stumps and logs were “rendering navigation more and more difficult,” he argued. “The navigation of Bayou Plaquemine is difficult and dangerous and the Atchafalaya is little … better. Steamboats of ordinary capacity are constantly liable to delays … and accidents.

“Something must be done to improve the mode of communication between Attakapas and the city, or navigation will before many years become so difficult as to cause depreciation in the value of property throughout this section. … the Teche itself is filling up, and we have the choice either to permit our great thoroughfares to be choked up … or to establish a railroad between this country and the city, which will defy all the snags … and will be for us a permanent highway for ages to come, by which we can fly to New Orleans in six hours.”

The editor realized that his idea was not going to find favor with every reader. He said he expected his suggestion “to meet with about as many dry land snags as our steamboats do with fresh water snags,” and compared opponents of his plan to “a gnarled tree that will make a first rate snag when it would hardly answer for any other purpose under heaven.”

But the problem of stubborn citizens paled in comparison to the two biggest issues: Politics, and money. To begin with, in 1850, the Louisiana constitution did not allow organization of the types of corporations needed to raise the cash to build a railroad – something the steamboat people wanted to keep. That was changed in 1853, over boatmen’s objections, when a new constitution was adopted.

The New Orleans, Opelousas, and Great Western Railroad was chartered right after the new constitution was adopted, but it wasn’t until 1857 that a line was completed from Algiers (across the Mississippi River from New Orleans) to Brashear City (Morgan City). The plan was to extend the line all the way to Texas, but no further construction had been done when the Civil War erupted. The war not only disrupted the extension, it also destroyed much of the line that had been built. It took a lot of money to rebuild that first part and even more to continue it to the Sabine.

Regular rail service didn’t reach the Teche country until 1880, three decades after the newspaper’s call for “a practical mode by which the citizens of Attakapas will ever be able to reach New Orleans.”

Some of the steamboats held on for a decade or more after that, but time is money and the ability to “fly” across the rails to New Orleans finally did them in.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jhbradshaw@bellsouth.net or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.