VASCONCELLOS: Part 3, THE FLUSH YEARS

CAPTAIN FERDINAND CELLOS & A HISTORY OF EARLY NEW ORLEANS

 

 12 October 1851, Ferdinand Cellos married Sarah H. Lyons, in New Orleans.  During the first ten years of their marriage Ferdinand was a clerk on two steamboats and a master of another.  Ferdinand was the master and captain of the steamboat Marion.  This vessel had a side-wheel packet with a wood hull.  It was built in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1854.  It weighed 133 tons.  Its hull size was 123 feet long by 26 feet wide and was 4.5 feet deep.  It operated from Alexandria-Shreveport until it was snagged and lost at Soda Lake, Louisiana, on 7 January 1859.

 

F.V. Cellos Masters River Boat Certificate

 

In 1868, Ferdinand was the clerk of the B.L. Hodge #2.  This steamboat was larger than the other.  It too was a side-wheel packet with a wood hull.  It was built in 1867, with a hull of 210' by 38' wide and 7' deep.  It weighed 699 tons.  It ran from New Orleans to Shreveport.  Ferdinand also was a clerk on the Julia A. Rudolph in 1869, which also ran from New Orleans to Shreveport.  It was burned at New Orleans, January 1, 1871.

The Mississippi River was considered the heritage of the people.  With the invention by Fulton of the steamboat, commerce and business saw tremendous growth in New Orleans.  It was in 1811 that New Orleans saw its first arrival of the steamboat.  During the early steamboat period of 1815-1840, New Orleans was one of the wealthiest cities in the Union and competed with New York for the rank of FIRST PORT IN AMERICA.  New Orleans became a great commercial center of the U.S. 

New Orleans was not a manufacturing city.  It did not consume the produce which it received but simply a point of trans-shipment.  It took the products that it received from the South and the West and exported them.

In the 1830s commerce to foreign countries exceeded the Atlantic Seaboard.  It was during this great commercial growth and enterprise that a change occurred.  The Erie and Ohio Canals began to divert much of the trade of Western produce of the Ohio Valley to New York and Philadelphia.

New Orleans compensated by concentrating more heavily on cotton and other Southern products being shipped to Europe rather than to American Seaports.  The people of the West supplied themselves more and more by the Canals and Railroad.  In 1840, imports dropped to 1/3 of the exports; in 1850 to 1/4 and in 1860 to 1/5.

The merchants of the city did not see the economic decline that they were entering into.  In their false security the let slip away the virtual commercial monopoly which they possessed.  Henry Righter stated, "New Orleans had, up to that time, been the port not for section only, but for the whole great valley, it had handled the sugar of Louisiana, the tobacco of Kentucky, the flour of the Ohio and the products of all the states of the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri valleys.  It let these slip away to whip at the shrine of cotton."

As commerce of the Western products dwindled from New Orleans, cotton continued to grow in importance.  New Orleans went from being a port for the West, to a port for cotton only.  The Western products that before constituted 80% of the commerce had dwindled to 20%. The merchants consoled each other by expressing their belief in the the natural waterway.  They believed this decline was only a temporary one and that it would not be long until trade would return to the levels of earlier times.  But it never did.  For on the horizon were unexpected diversions that they were totally unprepared for.  WAR!

First came the canals, followed by the trains, and then the final economic blow came...THE CIVIL WAR.  The year before the Civil War, was one of the most prosperous commercial years of the city.  There was a debate over how New Orleans would have fared commercially if the Civil War had not occurred.  Some say if New Orleans had realized the importance of the Railroad and had placed money in that area it would not have suffered the long term economic decline.  If it had continued in the same commercial direction it had been pursuing it would have taken decades to do what the WAR did in 4 years!