October 19, 2026
In February 1854, Belleville was following the opening of river navigation with a grim succession of steamboat disasters. Then came news from St. Louis: the boilers of the Kate Kearney had exploded.
The Semi-Weekly Advocate’s account, printed February 22, tried to make sense of a fast-moving tragedy. The paper said that reports of the dead and injured were still incomplete. Based on what it had gathered, at least seven people had been killed, with about twice that number seriously wounded. A wealthy merchant from Linn, Missouri, had been thrown into the river and was still missing. Two Belleville women traveling aboard the boat, Olive Harrison and her teacher, Miss Otis, were reported safe.
Then the article turned to a Belleville name familiar to Champion House: B. F. Champion, Patience Champion’s son.
Champion and L. D. Turner, whom the paper identified as being from the county, had two close calls. The evening before the explosion, both men had been passengers on the Kate Kearney, on the eve of its trip down from Alton. The newspaper described the boat as “miserably defective,” though that was the paper’s characterization, not a finding this clipping documents.
The next day, the two men were walking toward the ferry. They had just reached Wiggins’s corner when the explosion happened. According to the Advocate, they were only a few feet from the spot where a piece of the boiler struck the upper story of a building.
They had left the boat in time. Then, on the street, they came within a few feet of the debris.
The clipping does not record what B. F. Champion thought after the escape. His name appears in one brief paragraph near the end of a column otherwise filled with loss, unanswered questions, and the hazards of river travel. For the two Belleville women, the paper does describe the hours of uncertainty before word came that they had escaped uninjured.
That paragraph makes the history of Champion House feel close to the life of the city around it. The house’s story is usually told through construction dates, residents, and changes in ownership. Here, its first family steps into view through a moment of chance: Patience Champion’s son had been aboard the ill-fated boat the night before, and then narrowly missed the blast itself.
“The Explosion of the Kate Kearney,” The Semi-Weekly Advocate (Belleville, Illinois), February 22, 1854, page 2.