Thomas Cornell and the Cornell Steamboat Company

This is the story of a great New York State entrepreneur and his steamboat company.  It is also about a period of Hudson Valley history so colorful and important that it should never be forgotten.  The Cornell Steamboat Company, founded in 1837, was once the leading tugboat company in the nation.  In an era of unbridled free enterprise, the company won a virtual monopoly of Hudson River towing and endured into the 1960s.  Founder and president Thomas Cornell was a man of many interests: railroad and hotel builder, two-term congressman, founder and president of two banks.  The Cornell Steamboat Company was the jewel of Cornell’s vast business empire.  This book follows the arc of its history set against the exciting and turbulent backdrop of freight and passenger water transport in the Hudson Valley during the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth.

Illustrated throughout with black-and-white photos and illustrations.