The current issue of the Tazewell County Genealogical & Historical Society Monthly features a letter written 170 years ago by a Pekin woman who had survived a recent riverboat disaster.
The letter was provided to TCGHS by Dr. Bruce Ramsdall of Whitesburg, Georgia, whose great-great-grandmother Mary Amanda Nixon was the addressee of the letter, which was written 11 Jan. 1853 by Mary’s friend Fidelia L. Thompson.
In her letter, Fidelia tells Mary, “Ma has been sick almost ever since the boat blew up,” and also mentions, “Pa was scalded so bad we thought he would not live. I was taken out from the water for dead, but a lady saved Hellen by holding her out from the water.”
The date of the letter is in fact written as “1852,” but given the fact that Thompson and her family were from Pekin, it is thought that the riverboat explosion to which Thompson refers must be that of the Prairie State, which collapsed its flues at Pekin on 25 April 1852. The letter’s date “was likely an error for 1853 which is common when dating things right after the first of the year,” the TCGHS article says (page 511).
We told the story of the Prairie State disaster here at “From the History Room” a few years ago. Contemporary reports indicate that the explosion of the boat’s boilers killed no less than eight people and scalded at least 11, some of whom later recovered while others may have later died from their injuries. “Lloyd’s Steamboat Disasters” (1856), page 293, says 20 people were killed or wounded.
The report on the disaster in the New York Times, dated 6 May 1852, includes an admittedly incomplete list of kn dead and scalded, but Fidelia Thompson and her family are not on that list.
As time went on, memories of the disaster grew less and less accurate, and the tally of the dead became greatly inflated, until at last in “Pekin: A Pictorial History” (1998, 2002) it was erroneously claimed that 110 were killed, a figure that, if true, would make the explosion of the Prairie State one of the worse steamboat disasters in history. Even the date of the disaster was misremembered, with older published histories of Pekin mistakenly putting the tragedy on the nonexistent date of Sunday, 16 April 1852 — but that date was a Friday.
