“Summer Girl” The First Hamilton County Excursion Boat

any people probably remember the various excursion boats on Morse Reservoir—the “Morse Queen” in 1965, and the “Waterfront Queen” / ”Star of Cicero” which ran in the 1990’s and 2000’s. Hamilton County had another boat that preceded them and which ran more than twenty years before Morse Reservoir was even constructed.

Mill Complex

It came about because of the creation of the area called Riverwood in 1922 by the Holiday Hydroelectric Dam. This area had been used for mills for a century before this. The first mill may have been constructed by William Foster around 1820. It was a grist mill with a dam made from brush wood and was eventually owned by William Conner. The land surrounding the mill was not purchased from the government until 1832, when it was bought by Elijah Redmon and Bicknell Cole.

William Conner’s son, W. W. Conner, built a woolen mill in this area in 1845. It was damaged a few years later during one of the great floods. Smaller floods and freshets were constantly damaging the mill dam. The mill had been rebuilt into a large five-story building by 1866. By 1874, an entire milling complex had grown up with a grist mill for both wheat and corn, a woolen mill, and a saw mill. The millrace for these buildings had been cut into the solid limestone bedrock. A solid wooden dam was probably in use by this time. The village that had grown up around the milling complex established a post office in 1878 and named itself Clare.

However, by this time, steam power was allowing mills to be built closer to towns and railroads. In Noblesville in the 1890s, the giant Model Milling Company complex was built by the Marmon family. Clare was no longer a convenient place to bring crops. The group of structures were abandoned and neglected. The Clare post office closed in 1902. In 1908, the remaining buildings of the old mill were torn down and the wood reused for a hydroelectric dam project near Noblesville—which eventually failed.

In 1922, Alex Holiday, an MIT-trained engineer and son of the man who built Holiday Park in Indianapolis, surveyed the site of the old mill complex and decided it would be a good spot for another try at a hydroelectric dam. This one was successful, which led to the construction of the community at Riverwood.

Steam Launch

The community was designed to be a resort. Summer cabins were built, some of which were quite luxurious. A bathing pool was dug into the western bank creating an island to separate it from the river and loads of beach sand were spread on the shore. The Riverwood Café and the Fleming Store were established to provide amenities. The Downing family built a seventeenroom house which became the Lagoon Lodge in 1929 and still stands at River Bend campground.

Then in 1925, a newspaper article made an offhand remark that there was also an excursion boat. Named “Summer Girl”, she was run by the Smith & Evans Company of Muncie. Richard “Dick” Smith and Herbert Evens both had summer cabins at Riverwood. There are no images or detailed descriptions of the boat, but news accounts describe her