Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Editor’s Note: This the last in a series of three columns about the Belle of Austin.

By Tim Ruzek

In June 1897, a young Austin man and “his Sunday girl” were enjoying the picnic grounds of Columbia Park tucked between the Cedar River and Wolf Creek, north of Austin.

But that came to a halt when the couple suddenly realized the park’s grove of trees had been deserted.

They had “paid no attention to the steamer’s whistle” declaring when it was time for the Belle of Austin to boat back to downtown Austin, the Austin Daily Herald wrote June 28, 1897. The couple ran to the river as the Belle was being pushed from the shore. The man jumped into the boat but his “Sunday girl” was left behind.

“The young woman was mad — not ordinarily mad but jumping mad,” the Herald wrote, “so mad, that when the (Belle) captain had the boat touch at another landing and called to the girl to hurry up, she answered, ‘Go along with your old boat; I’ll walk.’ And she did.”

This was one of the memorable accounts of the Belle of Austin’s voyages in the 1890s to Columbia Park and back. Other trip reports included:

• July 1893 — Presbyterian Sunday School and friends (about 150 people) took the Belle to Columbia Park for a picnic and “games and other amusements with social enjoyment and plenty to eat combined to make the occasion especially pleasant.”

• June 1896 — Columbia Park hosted two picnic parties. The Herald, located near the Belle’s Main Street landing, noted “it looked as though both parties were supplied with enough picnic dinners and coffee pots for a regiment of soldiers but we don’t remember seeing them bring home anything but the dishes.”

• August 1896 — Arlington Hotel’s manager brought employees and guests to Columbia Park via the Belle, where Tischy’s band played music during a barbecue. “A campfire was built, and a merry evening was enjoyed around it.”

• July 1897 — The Belle was “well patronized” with crowds going to Columbia Park for Austin’s Fourth of July festivities that drew “thousands” into town, including for the Ringling Brothers’ Circus.

After the 1897 season, however, references to the Belle disappeared, with no articles even giving an update on the boat’s status.

Groups still made it upriver to Columbia Park, however, but these trip reports were infrequent compared to the Belle, and it’s not clear how people got to the park and back.

In June 1898, the Progressive Order of Johns had their annual outing at Columbia Park for about 125 people, with catered food, Tischy’s band, speeches and dancing. But there was no mention of the group’s transportation.

That same year, Furtney joined a gold exploration in northwest Canada for about five months of the boating season, which is likely why the Belle stopped being mentioned in newspapers.

In June 1899, teachers, students and alumni of Austin’s Southern Minnesota Normal College gathered for a picnic reunion at Columbia Park. Again, it wasn’t noted how they got there.

The next month, Furtney’s extended family had a picnic at Columbia Park but the Belle wasn’t mentioned.

By June 1900, groups still headed to Columbia Park thanks to Ben Hunkins, who started a boating business on the Cedar River at Central Park above the downtown dam.

Hunkins, who founded the Herald in 1891, had a gas-vapor launch for eight people that was used for chartered trips upriver along with six rental row boats. A chartered roundtrip from Central Park to Columbia Park was 10 cents per person.

One of his first groups involved 14 people who went to Columbia Park for a beef steak party and returned about 8 p.m. to Austin.

“Considerable interest has been aroused in boating this summer,” the Herald wrote June 7, 1900.

“We passed several naked savages on the way who swiftly got out of the way of Admiral Hunkins’ vessel,” the Herald wrote May 26, 1900. “Fishermen gazed in amazement at the trim, little craft that sped by, setting their corks bobbing as though whales had hold of the hooks.”

Gas-vapor boat launches started to appear on the Cedar at this time, including south of Austin on the mill pond behind the McAfee Dam, which was on the river until the 1930s near today’s County Road 28.

Later in that 1900 season, Hunkins purchased parkland south of Austin — 35 acres of wooded property on the Cedar’s eastern shore near Turtle Creek. He planned to open the park in spring 1901 in anticipation of higher river levels once the rebuild was done on McAfee Dam.

In 1903, Furtney died at age 53 after experiencing health issues for two years and being a “great sufferer,” the Herald wrote. Furtney was remembered as a “kind man” and owner of the “little steam boat” that “for a number of seasons piled up and down the Cedar.”

By 1905, Lafayette Park was nearing completion and being used for starting gas-vapor launch trips down the Cedar toward McAfee Dam.