Bristol (1866)

Stern view of Bristol, 1870. From a contemporary stereogram.
History
Name:	Bristol
Namesake:	Bristol, Rhode Island
Operator:	Fall River Line
Route:	New York-Newport-Fall River
Ordered:	About 1865
Builder:	William H. Webb
Cost:	$1,250,000
Launched:	4 April 1866
Completed:	1867
Acquired:	1867
Maiden voyage:	June 1867
In service:	1867-1888
Fate:	Destroyed by fire, December 30, 1888
General characteristics
Type:	Passenger sidewheel steamer
Tonnage:	2,962 gross, 2,064 net
Length:	362 ft (110 m)
Beam:	48 ft 4 in (14.73 m), over guards 83 ft
Draft:	10 ft 3 in (3.12 m)
Depth of hold:	16 ft 6 in (5.03 m)
Installed power:	1 × 110-inch-cylinder simple beam steam engine delivering 2,900 IHP @ 19 RPM, 3 × boilers
Propulsion:	2 × 38 ft 8 in paddlewheels
Capacity:	840 to 1,200 passengers plus 40 railcars of freight

Bristol was a large sidewheel steamer launched in 1866 by William H. Webb of New York for the Merchants Steamship Company. One of Narragansett Bay's so-called "floating palaces", the luxuriously outfitted Bristol and her sister ship Providence, each of which could carry up to 1,200 passengers, were installed with the largest engines then built in the United States, and were considered to be amongst the finest American-built vessels of their era.

Both ships would spend their entire careers steaming between New York and various destinations in and around Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. Bristol was eventually destroyed by a fire while in port in 1888.

Bristol and Providence owed their existence to a short-lived company known as the Merchants Steamship Company, which placed the initial order for the vessels with the Webb shipyard in about 1865. Merchants Steamship was an amalgamation of three existing Narragansett Bay shipping lines, the Commercial Line, Neptune Line and Stonington Line. The Company intended to run the two steamers between New York and Bristol, Rhode Island in competition with the Fall River Line, which ran a similar service from New York to Fall River, Massachusetts (both Lines then linking up to railway lines that continued on to Boston).

Work on both Bristol and Providence was delayed by a long strike, but Bristol was eventually launched on 4 April 1866, and Providence on July 28 of the same year. Between December 1865 and December 1866 however, the Merchants Steamship Company lost three of its existing ships, all of which were uninsured, thereby bankrupting the Company. Bristol and Providence remained in an uncompleted state at the shipyard until a new company, the Narragansett Steamship Company, which was partly owned by financier Jim Fisk, bought the new vessels in early 1867 and paid for their completion.

Bristol and Providence were both fitted with massive 110-inch-cylinder (9 foot 2 inch), 12-foot stroke walking beam engines, the largest engines ever fitted to American vessels up to that time - larger even than the 100-inch-cylinder engines for the mammoth ironclad USS Dunderberg built at the Webb shipyard around the same time. The steamboats' engines, which operated at the stately pace of 19 rpm, were designed by Erasmus W. Smith and built by the Etna Iron Works, which had only recently installed a lathe capable of boring such huge cylinders. The lathe itself was one of the two largest machine tools in the United States, the other being a planer installed by the same company.