Providence (1866 steamboat)  Providence was a large sidewheel steamer launched in 1866 by William H. Webb of New York for the Merchants Steamship Company. The first of Narragansett Bay's so-called "floating palaces", the luxuriously outfitted "Providence" and her sister ship "Bristol", each of which could carry up to 1,200 passengers, were installed with the largest engines then built in the United States, and were considered to be amongst the finest American-built vessels of their era. Both ships would spend their entire careers steaming between New York and various destinations in and around Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. "Providence" was eventually scrapped in 1901. "Providence" and "Bristol" owed their existence to a short-lived company known as the Merchants Steamship Company, which placed the initial order for the vessels with the Webb shipyard in about 1865. Merchants Steamship was an amalgamation of three existing Narragansett Bay shipping lines, the Commercial Line, Neptune Line and Stonington Line. The Company intended to run the two steamers between New York and Bristol, Rhode Island in competition with the Fall River Line, which ran a similar service from New York to Fall River, Massachusetts (both Lines then linking up to railway lines that continued on to Boston. "Providence" and "Bristol" were both fitted with massive 110-inch-cylinder (9 foot 2 inch) walking beam engines, the largest engines ever fitted to American vessels up to that time - larger even than the 100-inch-cylinder engine for the mammoth ironclad built at the Webb shipyard around the same time. The engines, designed by Erasmus W. Smith, were supplied by the Etna Iron Works, which had only recently installed a lathe capable of boring such huge cylinders. The lathe itself was one of the two largest machine tools in the United States, the other being a planer installed by the same company. Work on both "Bristol" and "Providence" was delayed by a long strike, but "Bristol" was eventually launched in April 1866, and "Providence" on July 28 of the same year. Between December 1865 and December 1866 however, the Merchants Steamship Company lost three of its existing ships, all of which were uninsured, thereby bankrupting the Company. "Bristol" and "Providence" remained in an uncompleted state at the shipyard until a new company, the Narragansett Steamship Company, which was partly owned by financier Jim Fisk, bought the new vessels in early 1867 and paid for their completion.