Arabia Steamboat Museum

The Arabia was a 171-foot sidewheeler built at Brownsville, Pennsylvania, in 1853, rated to carry 222 tons. On September 5, 1856, carrying more than 200 tons of goods for general stores and homes in sixteen frontier towns, she struck a submerged tree snag at Quindaro Bend near Parkville, about six miles west of Kansas City, and sank in minutes. All 150 passengers and crew got off. A mule tied below decks did not. Within days the river had covered her, and over the next century it moved away, leaving the wreck under a farm field on the Kansas side.

In the winter of 1988 Bob Hawley and his sons David and Greg, who ran a heating and air-conditioning business, found her with old maps and a magnetometer, half a mile from the river and 45 feet down. With Jerry Mackey and David Luttrell they dug from November 1988, with twenty irrigation pumps holding back the groundwater, and had to finish before spring planting. Sealed from light and air in the mud, the cargo had survived: dishes, tools, guns, clothing, beads, bottled fruit and sweet pickles.

The museum opened in the City Market in 1991. Cases hold the goods much as a frontier store would have stocked them, and a preservation lab where workers are still cleaning about sixty more tons is open to view.