A flatboat is a rectangular flat-bottomed boat with (mostly[notes 1])[1] square ends used to transport freight and passengers on inland waterways. The flatboat could be any size, but essentially it is large, sturdy tub with a hull that displaces water and so floats in the water. This differentiates the flatboat from the raft, which floats on the water.
A flatboat is almost always a one-way vessel, and is usually dismantled for lumber when it reaches its downstream destination.[notes 2]
Varieties of flatboat in the early 19th century included the mid-range broadhorn and Kentucky boat, and the longer-range New Orleans boat, which was fully covered. Some times wheels were attached to the flat boat and were wheeled in by horse.
After serving through the American War of Independence in the Pennsylvania line, the farmer Jacob Yoder invented and built the first flatboat (1782) on Redstone Creek at Redstone Old Fort, which soon after became Brownsville, Pennsylvania on the Monongahela River, which he freighted with flour and carried to New Orleans in May, 1782. The rest of America returned to normal as the revolution wound down, and that meant settling the Ohio Country, and after the peace treaty, the Northwest Territory, and the only way to haul enough freight for that was on the waterways. Fortunately the new territories were possessed of many of those, at least until one entered the rain shadows of the Rocky Mountains. Yoder's was the first attempt to navigate the Ohio and Mississippi rivers for commercial purposes,[2] and he succeeded brilliantly, giving the new country a new mindset about how to settle and exploit the West almost overnight. Watercraft would reign in the American frontier for the next 70 years, and then only decline because the railways spanned distances much faster, but far less economically. Brownsville, strategically sited at the river ford along the Nemacolin Trail at the end of Burd's Road where wagons could safely make a descent down the steep slopes encountered crossing the Cumberland Narrows pass became a specialist city in emigrant outfitting, the surrounding region for tens of miles developing cottage industries (boxes, barrels, brewers, weavers and clothes makers), and feedstock (e.g. timber, lumber, pig iron, iron fittings and nails) gathered, built, manufactured, mined, or bred for the benefit of the tens of thousands coming by Stage coach from Cumberland, Maryland over the mountains desiring for homestead farther west.
An average of 3,000 flatboats descended the Ohio River each year between 1810 and 1820, the great majority of them being constructed at Brownsville with settlers heading to destinations as diverse as Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Iowa and Illinois. Abraham Lincoln twice piloted a flatboat carrying produce to New Orleans, from Indiana in 1828 and from Illinois in 1831.
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There were a variety of specialized flatboats [eventually developed] to ship cargo to world markets. Some [later, meaning c. 1815–20, after steam boats became common] flatboats were built with raked bows to be used on return trips alongside steamboats, serving as 'fuel flats', first hauling wood, then coal. These flatboats with raked bows evolved into coal boats. (Later,) Coal boats were tied together in fleets to be pushed by steamboats. Those coal boats evolved into the steel barges of today (plying the rivers servicing the coal fields of the Ohio River watershed).
— Nancy Jordan Blackmore, Janes Saddlebag