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‘It was Play or Starve’: John Banvard's Account of Early Showboats
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
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John Banvard was a nineteenth-century adventurer, painter, poet, and theatre owner. Born in 1815 in New York City, he was forced to leave home at fifteen years of age when his father died and left the family penniless. He followed an older brother to Louisville, Kentucky, where he worked as an apothecary's helper and amateur artist. In 1833 he joined the Chapman Family as a scenic artist on the Floating Theatre, also known as Chapman's Ark, America's first showboat. This experience inspired Banvard to operate his own showboats and display his landscape paintings.
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1. William Chapman, his daughter Caroline, his two sons Samuel and William, Jr and their wives and children emigrated from England in 1827. They toured the Western river system and found public halls and taverns inadequate for theatrical work. William Sr then struck upon the idea of a floating theatre. For accounts of the Chapman Family, see Graham, Philip, Showboats: The History of an American Institution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961)Google Scholar, and Reed, Duane Eldon, ‘A History of the Showboats on the Western Rivers’, Vol. I (Ph.D. Dissertation, Michigan State University, 1977).Google Scholar Ford's, George D. These Were Actors: A Story of the Chapmans and the Drakes (New York: Library Publishers, 1955)Google Scholar provides a fictionalized and undocumented account.
2. Graham (pp. 13–14) claims the Ark was one hundred feet long and sixteen feet wide, with a narrow, shallow stage at the stern, a pit in the middle, and a rear gallery for blacks. He also states that the enclosed portion of the boat was fourteen feet wide, but Banvard's description places box seats built out over the water. Theatre manager Noah Ludlow in 1831 or 1832 saw the Chapmans and described the Ark as ‘a large flat-boat with a rude kind of house built upon it, having a ridge-roof, above which projected a staff with a flag attached, upon which was plainly visible the word “Theatre!”’ Noah Ludlow, Dramatic Life As I Found It (reprint; -New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966), p. 568.Google Scholar
3. Banvard's earlier description has not survived. New Harmony, Indiana, was the site of two major nineteenth-century social experiments. The first, founded by religious leader George Rapp (1770–1847) on twenty-five thousand acres, established a disciplined, celibate (husbands and wives were housed in separate dormitories), thriving community under the auspices of a religious and economic dictatorship. Rapp sold New Harmony after a vision in 1825 to the British industrialist and great social reformer Robert Owen (1771–1858). Owen founded a ‘Utopia on the Wabash’, a site for scientists, artists, and skilled laborers to come together in a perfect communal society. In the end, however, it did not work, and by 1827 much of the land had returned to private hands. Despite that, New Harmony's list of accomplishments were considerable: America's first free public school system; the first public trade school; site of the first speed press, a machine that printed a newspaper on a continuous sheet; the first kindergarten; and the first woman's club. For a brief narrative of New Harmony see Wilson, William E., Indiana: A History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), pp. 62–81.Google Scholar
4. Corduroy – rough logs laid sideways.
5. George Blanchard opened his Amphitheater on 18 January 1830. He staged equestrian acts featuring his family; later he presented legitimate plays. The theatre folded in August 1830. Odell, G. C. D., Annals of the New York Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–1949), III, 469.Google Scholar
6. David Dale Owen (1807–60) was Robert Owen's son. After abandoning his art studies under Benjamin West, Owen devoted his life to science. From 1839 until 1856, New Harmony served as headquarters for the US Geological Survey; Owen was named Chief US Geologist.
7. The vessel's medium-size length suggests that it was a ‘dead man's boat’, so named because crew watchmen on top of its small cabin were often drowned after being swept off by overhanging tree limbs.
8. The floating grocery boat, flying a bright red flag (yellow if it carried dry goods), was a common sight on the navigable Western rivers. Robert Sutcliffe, an early traveler in the region, described them:
As they sail along the river on coming to a plantation they blow a horn or conch shell, to give notice of their arrival; when the planters and their wives and daughters repair to these floating shops and select such things as they are in want of; and make payment in the produce of their plantations, such as grain, flour, cotton, tobacco, dried venison, the skins of wild animals.
Quoted in Wright, Richardson, Hawkers and Walkers in Early America: Strolling Peddlers, Preachers, Lawyers, Doctors [sic] Players, and Others, from the Beginning to the Civil War (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippencott, 1927), p. 247.Google Scholar
9. These ‘physical experiments’ may have been simple magic tricks or lights and flash pots to illuminate some of Banvard's paintings. John Griscom (1774–1852), Quaker reformer and scientist, was an early pioneer in the teaching of chemistry. His popular high school lectures were always open to the public and he held the first chair in chemistry (1812) at Rutgers.
10. Puncheon is rough timber with one side hewed flat.
11. A sawyer is a submerged tree.
12. John Belts, a respected citizen of Paducah, served on its Board of Health, an important position in a region that suffered frequent epidemics. This was probably the source of his medical knowledge for treating Banvard. See Robertson, John E. L., ‘Paducah: Origins to Second Class’, The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, LXVI (04 1968), 111.Google Scholar
13. The three sisters came to Kentucky in a roundabout way. In 1826, John Hallam (d. 1829) asked his Philadelphia manager, Joseph Cowell, for a leave of absence to travel to England and find a wife. Cowell gave his permission on the condition that if Hallam found any talented actors there willing to work for three guineas a week, he was to bring them back. Hallam returned with a wife and his talent finds consisted of the new Mrs Hallam's two sisters, Rachel Stannard (b. 1800) and Mrs Mitchell and her husband. ‘The rest of the family’, Cowell dryly noted in his memoirs, ‘couldn't come, I suppose’. Cowell, Joseph, Thirty Years Passed Among the Players in England and France (New York: Harper, 1844), pp. 80–1.Google Scholar
Rachel Stannard had just returned from St Louis where in July 1835, she worked for Noah Ludlow at the Salt House Theatre. Carson, William G. B., The Theatre on the Frontier: The Early Tears of the Si Louis Stage, Second Edition (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965), pp. 149–50.Google Scholar
Mrs Hallam died in Paducah in 1838.