The Wreck of the Greenfield Marks the End of the Connecticut River Men

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In 1840, the river men who hitched their fortunes to ships like the Greenfield, which hauled freight up and down the Connecticut River, were in for a disappointing surprise.

Since the early days of colonial New England the river had served as a means of transporting raw materials and finished goods. Boats carried tons of cargo back and forth from Vermont, New Hampshire and Western Massachusetts to Hartford, Conn. and beyond.

In the age of sail, a long flat boat was used. It carried a single mast with a square mainsail down low and a smaller sail above for lighter winds. For extremely light wind, the flatboat had another topsail.

Connecticut River Men

River men called spike-pole men worked the boats. When the wind was insufficient to propel the boat against the current – which it frequently was – the spike-pole men stepped in. Using poles 12 to 20 feet long, they would drag the boat forward by planting the spike end of their poles into the river bed and walking from forward to aft on the boat.

The age of steam put an end to the spike-pole men. Boats were fitted with steam engines in the early 1800s that could do the job faster. A single steam-powered river boat could tow one or more barges upriver and back.

By 1840, however, trains posed a new threat to the river men. The same steam power that could power a boat could also pull a train. The increasingly reliable trains could carry more cargo that the flat steamboats..

For river men, the race was on.

The Greenfield

Stockbridge, Allen, Root & Co. had formed in Greenfield, Mass., by combining two smaller concerns. The company’s business was groceries and freight hauling. One Monday in May of 1840, it sent its steam vessel Greenfield on a journey up river from Hartford to points in Massachusetts.

The steamer hauled four barges, and planned to connect a fifth. The vessel was a new one, an investment of $5,000 to $10,000. The company wanted to speed up shipping and become more competitive. The boat was narrow and drew little water to help it navigate canal locks. The engineer who built the vessel, with its twin boilers, was aboard to oversee how the new boilers would operate under the extreme load.

The safety of boilers was a major concern in the day. Some 14 percent of all steamship boilers exploded in the 1830s. Congress had passed laws, albeit weak ones, to improve their safety. But the explosions kept on.

Just south of Northampton, Mass. calamity struck: the Greenfield’s boilers exploded.  They blew holes in the ship, sending it immediately to the bottom. Portions of the boilers were found in the fields on the side of the river.

Blown apart by the explosion were Capt. John D. Crawford, of South Hadley Falls in Massachusetts; engineer Alanson D. Wood, of Brattleboro, Vt., and William Lancey, the designer of the vessel, from Springfield, Mass.

Railroads Take Over

In all, some 30 men were manning the Greenfield and the barges it towed. Most escaped injury. Ebenezer Morse of Northampton had the good fortune to be standing directly beside one of the boilers when it blew. The explosion threw him high into the air. He splashed down into the river with barely a scratch.

Captain Crawford was a highly regarded river man with 10 years’ experience, but he and the company couldn’t escape all criticism.

“Perhaps no blame should be attached to anybody,” the Northampton Gazette noted. “[B]ut we cannot refrain from believing from the best information we can obtain, that the boat was pushed harder than prudence and safety would warrant. It was a new boat, and there was an ambition to establish its reputation for speed.”

Reputation for speed or no, river men soon lost the race to the railroads as they expanded in the years ahead. The freight firm Stockbridge, Allen, Root & Co. would go out of business after the Connecticut Railroad Co. bought it.

This story was updated in 2021.