Julia Belle Swain to make appearance at Riverside Park

A riverboat legend is about to go on display.  

 The Julia Belle Swain steam paddlewheeler will be parked at Riverside Park in La Crosse on April 28th and 29th and during another weekend in May.  

Although she’s nowhere near ready for primetime, said steam engineer Dillon Connor.

“There’s still a whole summer worth of work here yet to do,” he said. “I don’t actually see us doing passenger cruises for quite awhile yet.”

 The Julia Belle Swain was essentially mothballed during the last recession and has been going through a complete restoration through the efforts of non-profit that plans to keep the boat in La Crosse.  

Connor said the most exhaustive work so far has been simply sandblasting all of the paint off the boat.

“The amount of paint that had gone onto the boat over the years was unbelieveable,” he said.  In some places, he estimated, the paint was 3/16″ thick.

Surprisingly, Connor said, the Julia Belle Swain’s steam engines that were built over a hundred years ago are in remarkably good shape and required little but painting to be ready to go.  

The boat itself was the last built by the Dubuque Boat & Boiler Co. in 1971.