The first steamboat to reach Nashville arrived in March 1819, and it was named the General Jackson. Its successor still works the same water.
Every Nashville Riverboat Cruise Dinner sailing aboard today's General Jackson Showboat follows a channel that steam traffic opened on the Cumberland River more than two centuries ago.
The Cumberland runs some 688 miles from the Kentucky uplands to the Ohio, bending through Nashville in a sequence of tight horseshoes. Before the railroads, that bend was the city's economy. Tobacco, cotton and pig iron left the Public Square wharf by packet boat. Steamers tied up several deep at the landing. River passenger trade faded through the early twentieth century, and for decades the channel carried barges rather than travellers; a Nashville riverboat cruise dinner tour would have read as an anachronism in 1960.
That changed in 1985. The General Jackson was built at Jeffersonville, Indiana, floated down the Ohio and delivered to Opryland, where she has berthed ever since at 2812 Opryland Dr. She measures roughly 300 feet, stands four decks high, and is driven by a stern paddlewheel rather than a propeller. Capacity approaches 1,200 passengers. Her centrepiece is the two-story Victorian Theater, a proscenium room in brass, mirror and dark wood, where the live entertainment is staged while the hull works upstream. Smaller pontoon and paddlewheeler vessels now share the same reach of water, and Nashville Riverboat Cruise Dinner tours are only one of several ways the river is read.
The city has since turned back toward its waterfront. Nissan Stadium rose on the east bank in 1999; the old truss bridge above it reopened to pedestrians in 2003; Nashville's downtown skyline now presents itself as a wall of glass and limestone from mid-channel. The showboat passes it twice each evening, outbound and back. What it offers is less a spectacle than a shift of vantage: a Cumberland River paddlewheel cruise puts the visitor below the level of the streets, at the speed the city was first approached. The General Jackson has been in service for four decades, longer than most of the buildings she passes. A Nashville Riverboat Cruise Dinner remains, in that sense, a piece of continuity rather than novelty.
2 hr
