John L. Stephens, 1852-1879
Built in New York for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company in 1851,1 the John L. Stephens was 84 m long and apparently named for one of founders of the Panama Rail-Road.2
It was placed on the Panama to San Francisco run, arriving in San Francisco on 3 April 1852, where it remained in this service until October 1860.2 In 1864 it ran between San Francisco and the Columbia.3 In 1878, it was sold in San Francisco to Sisson, Wallace and Company, who sent it to Karluk, Alaska, as a floating cannery; it was retired upon its return to San Francisco and broken up in 1879.4
  • 1. Will Lawson, Pacific Steamers (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, Ltd., 1927), 203.
  • 2. John Haskell Kemble, The Panama Route, 1848-1869 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), 233.
  • 3. Ibid.
  • 4. Ibid.
  • 5. Ibid.
Mentions of this vessel in the documents