The Wreck of the America in Southern Illinois: A Flatboat on the Ohio River By Mark J. Wagner

Abstract

You don’t come across the remains of an Ohio or Mississippi River turn-of-the- nineteenth-century flatboat every day or even every year. In 2000, one was discovered not far from where the Ohio meets the Mississippi. At normal river levels, boaters might have sailed right atop this sunken treasure. It’s located on the Indiana-Illinois side (the right-descending bank), about ten miles upriver from the Ohio’s confluence with the Mississippi, and a few miles upstream from Mound City, Illinois. What a discovery! This flatboat may have sunk when Indiana and Illinois were still territories, or shortly after they became states.