The Steamboat Madison
A floating country store, was on the Suwannee before the Civil War. Captain James Tucker owned and operated her. He carried a line of merchandise traded for money, cows, beeves, tallow, chickens, eggs, hogs, fattened often on velvet beans and peanuts, (pinders) deer, skins, venison, beeswax, honey, gum, resin, lumber, cotton, or whatever came his way. It would be called “diversified “ by today’s economic Solomons. Captain Tucker didn’t call it anything except making a living.
He always stayed at the landings as long as people wanted to trade since there were a few if any warehouses and those days along this almost 266-mile river.
The Madison wasn’t large. But her whistle was loud and lusty, heard for miles along the Suwannee. It warned farmers, Woodman, planters to come on the run with their goods. Many were already waiting, their produce stacked high at the landings.
That all stern wheeler was a part of their lives. The sight of her was like singing the Star-Spangled Banner or running up the flag in the courthouse Square in the good old days on the Fourth of July. Sometimes Captain and crew threw down Nickels as they docked and what a scramble on shore! A Nickel was good for a day spending on the Fourth before times changed in these United States.
“None of those stern paddle wheelers on the Suwannee ever excited more interest than the Madison did to us scattered Florida crackers along the Suwannee”, wrote, 19th century, White Springs, printer and editor of the White Springs Harold John Caldwell, February 27, 1903.
Captain Tucker ran her from Cedar Key near the mouth up as far as the height of the water would permit. One round trip a week she always went as high as Troy on what is now the Suwannee side of the river.
When the water was high enough, the boat would go as far up as Columbus, which was then a small town of considerable importance and stood across the Suwannee from where Ellaville is now. (The Suwannee River State Park.)
Once he brought her to the White Springs. The river captain could not obtain the necessary legislation to get the Suwannee declared a navigable stream as far as White Springs because no boat had ever navigated the river higher than Columbus.
When this was reported to Captain Tucker, he swore he’d be damned if he didn’t put the Madison into White springs if he had to run her up their up there on wheels.
It began to rain. The river began to rise. It kept on raining. The river kept on rising till Suwannee overflowed it banks and ran way out in the woods.
The captain steamed up the Madison and put out for White springs. He got there. He got back. But his smokestack and pilot house were gone. By the time he got the Madison thoroughly repaired, the Suwannee River was declared to be a navigable stream from its mouth to White Springs!
The above Account is now in the state archives in Tallahassee copied under the supervision of the survey and historical records in 1937 and a copy now carefully preserved in the P. K .Yonge Historical Library of the university of Florida in Gainesville.
When the Civil War began, Captain Tucker raised a company of Confederate soldiers and took them aboard the Madison.
One night they slipped out from the Suwannee and captured a federal gunboat. Finally, however, orders came for the Captain and his company to go to Virginia as company H of the 8th Florida infantry.
Infantry of all things for this Suwannee River boat captain! What to do with the Madison? At last Captain Tucker knew. It was in September 1863, the grizzly war going full blast, He would sink her an old Troy Springs. But some citizens down river wanted her for bringing back a load of precious corn from Suwannee old town near the mouth. Times were bad. Folks were hungry. They were starving. So, we were animals.
All right. They could have his boat as long as they needed her. But later on, be sure to sink her for him in old Troy Springs.
She brought her priceless load of corn upriver. Then at 2 o’clock in the afternoon of a bright, sunny September day, 1863, E. J. Davis, Joab Ward and John Caldwell, the White Springs editor, ran her from Troy Landing into the Springs.
They pulled out her plugs, sat there and watched her die until she rested on the bottom of the Suwannee.
You have to love a steamboat to care about what happened to the Madison. When the river is not too high and overflowing the Springs. you can see her hull there today where three men sank her so long ago.
Captain Tucker never came back to claim what was left of her.
During the Civil War her boilers were removed, split lengthwise, carried to the seacoast and used in the manufacturer of salt. Her smokestacks were cut into convenient links and used by farmers as funnels for sugar furnaces. Her cabins were torn up and used by whoever needed it. There was need for almost everything in those grim days.
At the end of the Civil War in April 1865, all that was left of the Madison was the hull, “resting on the rocks under the crystal waters of old Troy Springs”
So wrote printer John Caldwell. He was there. He ought to know.
And never again did the loud and Lusty whistle of this faithful sternwheeler, of the Suwannee, Warn Pioneer settlers or affluent planters from white pillared mansions of the cotton acres to come on the double quick with their merchandise.
Note: cited information on the
Madison comes from an article published in 1903 by John M. Caldwell, a
contemporary of Capt. Tucker, and one of the locals who helped scuttle the
boat in 1863].
http://files.usgwarchives.net/fl/lafayette/history/carltroy.txt
C.A.R.L. Report on History of Troy Springs area, Lafayette County, Florida