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8 February 2024 — Remembering Three Showboats from the Last Century
In the last Sea History Today, we talked about the history of showboats—their emergence to bring entertainment to audiences eager for a distraction, their immense popularity in the new century, and their decline as moving pictures lured the public elsewhere and automobiles brought increased mobility. This week, let’s take a look at three of the most famous showboats.
Goldenrod
The largest showboat ever made, Goldenrod measured 200 x 45 feet and her auditorium could seat 1,400 people. She was built in 1909 for W. R. Markle, the most successful showboat owner of the period, by the showboat powerhouse Pope Dock Company in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Historian Philip Graham described her lavish interior:
On the outside she was plain, almost to the point of severity… but on the inside … Gilt friezes and highly wrought brass decorated balcony and box railings. Draperies and upholstery were of red velour, and the floor was richly carpeted. Full-length wall mirrors exaggerated the size of the spacious auditorium.
Markle called her W. R. Markle’s New Showboat—we've seen before that the showboat men didn't didn't favor originality or pizzazz in naming their craft—but his sister overruled him and dubbed the grand new boat Goldenrod.
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 | Goldenrod (Sometimes spelled Golden Rod), 1916 (PD) | |
The boat changed hands and was purchased by John William “Bill” and Ben Menke in 1922; they had a fleet of showboats, which their brothers Harry and Charles helped manage. After years on the river circuit, Bill Menke brought Goldenrod to the St. Louis waterfront in 1937 for a two-week engagement and never left; the showboat became a regular venue in the city.
On 1 June 1962 she was badly damaged by fire; Menke sold Goldenrod to riverboat enthusiast Frank Pierson, who, along with a group of investors, restored the boat. The remodeling inside included converting the upstairs to a dining room and installing a bandstand; the showboat was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. She was a popular venue and hosted the National Ragtime Festival.
In 1989 she was purchased by the city of St. Charles, Missouri, renovated again, and run as a dinner theater until she ran aground in 2001, causing sufficient damage that the city chose to give her away. She changed hands several times in the ensuing years, but none of the parties was successful in their plans for the craft. She suffered damage from dropping river levels, flooding, and finally a fire in 2017, and what remained was scrapped that year.
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Majestic
The showboat Majestic was built in Pittsburgh in 1923 for Thomas Jefferson Reynolds, to be an upgrade from his previous showboat, America. Majestic relied on the diesel sternwheel towboat Attaboy to make her way, operating on the Ohio River and its tributaries and wintering in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Unlike the Floating Theatre, which frequently stayed a week in a given town, the Reynolds company—composed mostly of Tom’s extensive family—performed shows such as Lust, Lucre and Liquor and The Vengeance of Emory Blacksloth in a different locale every night. During World War II she remained in Point Pleasant, a hiatus broken up by a handful of small performances; by the end of the war the Reynolds children had all grown up and the theater company was no more.
In 1948 the drama departments of Kent State University and Hiram College leased Majestic, with Captain Reynolds at the helm, to present shows in towns along the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers; Hiram College continued to lease her until 1958. In 1959 Indiana University bought Majestic and Attaboy outright. Capt. Reynolds drowned while out on Attaboy that year; Tom Jr. stepped in to finish the season. Under IU’s ownership, she toured on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers between Cincinnati and Hickman, Kentucky.
Getting on in years, Majestic was sorely in need of repairs by the late 1960s, and the university opted to sell her to the city of Cincinnati to serve as a performance venue for a planned future set of events. She underwent restoration work; rather than repair her leaking wooden hull, the crew submerged a new steel outer hull in a floating drydock, floated Majestic over it, and dropped her into the outer hull. She was the venue for University of Cincinnati summer stock theater until 1988, and she remained in Cincinnati until 2019, when she was purchased by Joe Brumley, who had plans for the vessel that included hosting performances and offering charter tours. She is now near Maysville, Kentucky; it is unclear what Brumley plans for her in the near future.
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James Adams Floating Theatre
James Adams and his wife, Gertie, caught the theater bug early, abandoning their mundane jobs in Michigan to train as circus aerialists. As James seemed to have an entrepreneurial spirit, he started a traveling medicine show, a vaudeville show—he claimed to be the father of the ten-cent vaudeville tent show—and traveling circuses. By age 41 he had accrued a tidy sum and decided to ty the showboat life. He designed a boat and had it built at Bill Chauncey’s Boat Yard in Washington, North Carolina. Like so many other showboats of the era, she was basically a rectangle box mounted on a barge; in some photos it would be easy to mistake her for a building on shore. Lacking her own propulsion, she would be guided on her route by two tugboats, Elk and Trouper. Bearing the remarkably unremarkable name of the James Adams Floating Theatre and launched in 1914, the 122 foot-by 34 foot craft boasted a 19x15 stage. Her performance space, including the balcony and theater boxes, could accommodate 700.
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Charles Hunter was the company’s dramatic director as well as its leading man; he married its leading lady, James’s sister Beulah, “Mary Pickford of the Chesapeake.” Hunter rounded out the company with actors who had come up in the Midwest and the western states; he found that actors who had trod the boards in New York City tended not to adjust well to the laid-back schedule of the river performances and the slow pace on the river when they were en route. With a small troupe of actors and a ten-piece orchestra, the Floating Theatre made its way around river towns in Maryland and Virginia, adding North Carolina to the territory in later years. James Adams, and his brother Selba, who took over as general manager in 1925, steered the operation through the highly profitable years leading up to the Depression and the advent of motion pictures, and even continued it as a going concern in the 1930s.
It was on the Pamlico River in Bath, North Carolina, that author Edna Ferber approached the troupe and asked to sign on for a bit. Ferber had been intrigued with showboat life as a subject for her next novel, and she wanted to do some research. For four days she lived aboard, working in the box office, paying attention to the daily routine, and listening to Hunter’s stories and observations of their life on the river. Ferber poured that experience into her novel Show Boat, published in 1926; it was adapted the next year into a Broadway hit musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. Both the novel and the musical were adapted over the years for film, assuring that the spirit of the Floating Theatre will live on in our popular culture, though the boat was destroyed by fire in 1941.
Extra Credit
Oral History: Tom Weatherston shares memories of performing on Majestic during the Kent State/Hiram College years
Sea History Today is written by Shelley Reid, NMHS senior staff writer. Past issues can be read online by clicking here.
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