Steamboat Arabia Beneath Kansas Cornfield

In 1856, the sidewheel steamboat Arabia sank in the Missouri River near what is now Kansas City after it struck a submerged tree snag while carrying about 200 tons of cargo upriver. In the following decades, the river shifted its course, and the buried wreck ended up deep beneath a farmer’s cornfield in present-day Kansas. In 1988, Kansas City explorer David Hawley and his team located and excavated the Arabia, uncovering thousands of remarkably preserved pre-Civil War artifacts. Their work showed that large 19th-century riverboats can lie entombed far from any shoreline, hidden under Midwestern cropland instead of on the riverbed.

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