User:Emailrobert/The Steamer Sprague Paddleboat

The Steamer Sprague Paddleboat, also known as "The Big Mama of the Mississippi," was a stern wheel towboat constructed in 1901 by the Dubuque Boat and Boiler Works in Iowa for the Monongehela River Consolidated Coal and Coke Company. It was the largest and most powerful stern wheel towboat at 318 feet long and 61 feet wide.

In 1907 the Sprague broke the record for towing by a steam-powered vessel when it pushed the largest tow of barges at 60 units measuring 1,125 feet long, 312 feet wide, and 67,307 tons. However, when she lost a tow load of 53,200 tons of coal above Osceola, Arkansas, she also broke a record for the most tows lost.

The Sprague steamboat was decommissioned in 1948 in Memphis, Tennessee having traveled just under one million miles or about a distance equal to forty times around the earth. The plan was to scrap the steamboat, but several citizens of Vicksburg saved the boat to use as a floating theater for the melodrama Gold in the Hills, as a home for a river-related museum, and as the Vicksburg Yacht Club. The Sprague burned in 1974 and eventually sank in 1979.

There is currently a call by citizens to save the Sprague by taking the remnants and bringing them back to life in the Transportation Museum in Vicksburg, Mississippi and a mural was dedicated to the Sprague in March of 2007.