the middle of the nineteenth century, showboats could seat up to 3,400 and regularly featured wax museums and equestrian shows. Showboats disappeared entirely with the advent of the American Civil War, but began again in 1878. Upon their revival, they tended to focus on melodrama and vaudeville. Major boats of this period included the New Sensation, New Era, Water Queen, and the Princess. New inventions such as the steamer tow and the steam calliope greatly increased both territory and audiences, and Stephen Foster’s songs added charm to their simple programs. With the improvement of roads, the rise of the automobile, motion pictures, and the maturation of the river culture, the popularity of showboats again began to decline. In order to combat this development, they grew in size and became more colorful and elaborately designed in the 1900s. The Golden Rod seated 1,400 persons; the Cotton Blossom, the Sunny South, and the New Showboat were floating theatre palaces. With the burlesquing of these programs throughout the 1930s to attract sophisticated audiences, showboats ceased to perform their original function. The last showboat to travel the rivers in authentic pattern was the Golden Rod in 1943. The glory days of showboats are recalled by the Majestic, which is docked on the Ohio River in Downtown Cincinnati. Until 2013, she served as a venue for regular performances. Popular culture In 1914, circus actors James Adams and his wife launched the James Adams Floating Theatre, a showboat that would tour the Chesapeake Bay and bring theatre to audiences in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. In the process of writing her 1926 novel Show Boat, Edna Ferber stayed on board the James Adams Floating Theatre to gather research material on the showboat, a disappearing American pastime. This novel served as the inspiration for the award-winning Kern and Hammerstein Broadway hit, Show Boat (1927). Since the box-office success of MGM's 1951 motion picture version of the musical Show Boat, in which the boat was inaccurately redesigned as a deluxe, self-propelled steamboat, the image of a showboat as a large twin-stacked vessel with a huge paddle wheel at the rear has taken hold in popular culture. Two earlier film versions of Show Boat and most stage productions feature a historically accurate vessel, and Edna Ferber's novel on which the musical is based gives a description of the Cotton Blossom that accurately reflects the design of a nineteenth-century showboat.