Defining Eastern North Carolina Upriver Steamboats Through Tar River Archaeology and History

Abstract

This thesis will identify the salient features of North Carolina upriver steamboats and their relationships to steamboats from a variety of regions in the United States in an effort to understand the means by which people adapted and reinvented the steamboat for an array of different environments. Upriver steamboats on the Tar River in eastern North Carolina were an amalgamation of available inland marine technology designed, borrowed, and adapted to allow steamboat service despite navigational hazards and low water. The Tar River had a commercial history that paralleled other southeastern waterways, and, therefore, it is an appropriate case study of navigation on an upriver transport zone in the southeastern United States.