A visit to Boston's Public Garden would not be complete without a ride on the famous Swan Boats. The story of the Swan Boats is a history steeped in family tradition and entrepeneurship.
Boston's Public Garden, the first of the botanical gardens established in the United States, was constructed in 1859. For almost twenty years, however, the Garden did not have passenger boats plying the waters of its lagoon.
In the 1870's, Robert Paget acquired a license from the city of Boston to hire out his services. He used rowboats initially to give passengers a ride in the lagoon.
In 1877, Paget came up with the first Swan Boat design. He placed a flat deck atop a thirty foot long catamaran and located a paddle wheel near the stern. The fifty inch diameter paddle wheel and boat rudder were operated by a person pedaling a bicycle type mechanism. This device rotated the paddle wheel and propelled the boat through the water. Passengers, eight per ride, sat on two wooden benches on the deck with a striped canopy shading them.
Desiring to make the operator's pedaling less obvious, Paget looked at Lohengrin for inspiration. In Wagner's opera, the hero knight is transported in a boat powered by a swimming swan. The large swan cutouts which hid the operator's movements became a fixture of Boston Public Garden.
Robert Paget died in 1878 at the age of 42, leaving behind a wife and four children. He saw his Swan Boats in operation for only one season. Julia Paget, his widow, operated the business until 1914. The mind-set of the late 1800's dictated that a woman could not possibly know how to successfully operate a business. In those early years, she had to ask other businessmen of Back Bay to vouch for her business sense in order to remain in operation.
In 1914, her youngest son, John, took over. It was he who redesigned the Swan Boats to accommodate the larger groups attracted to the boat rides. By increasing the seating to five or six benches, each of the six vessels in the Swan Boat fleet had room for twenty passengers. John and Ella Paget and their six children managed the family business until John's death in 1969. The design for the Swan Boats was copyrighted in the 1980's.
Paul and Marilyn Paget operated the family business until 1991, when Phil Paget took over. The oldest boat still in operation was built in 1918 by John Paget.
The paddle wheel is designed to rotate forty revolutions per minute, which allows the boat to go about two miles an hour. Each circuit around the three acres of the twin ponds takes a total of fifteen minutes. Each boat makes a circle around one pond, goes under the 1867 suspension footbridge, circles the other pond, goes back under the bridge, and returns to the loading dock. April to September are the times the Swan Boats are in operation. The boats must be assembled in the spring and disassembled in the fall each year in a process which takes up to four days. Except for times when the weather will not permit safe sailing, the Swan Boats are available each day and are wheelchair accessible.
Boston's Public Garden and the Swan Boats are mentioned in Robert McCloskey's Make Way For Ducklings and E.B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan. Famous visitors to the Swan Boats included Princess Grace of Monaco, President John F. Kennedy, the polar explorer Admiral Richard Byrd, Will Rogers, Lucille Ball, Bette Davis, Charles Bronson, Gregory Peck, and Anthony Quinn. The Paget family has a record of notable guests on their Swan Boat website.
But it is the citizens of Boston who made the Swan Boats a symbol of their city, and it was Julia Paget who kept her husband's dream alive.
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Sources:
http://massachusetts-travel.suite101. com/article.cfm/swan_boats_signal_spring_in_boston
ht tp://tech.mit.edu/V125/N33/swanboats.html
http://en.w ikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Public_Garden
http://www.swa nboats.com/history.php for several historic photos of the Paget family and the Swan boats plus a news clipping and contact information.