A year later, Lewis Cass students see their flatboat project work

May 17—It took a year of waiting, but the students of Lewis Cass Junior-Senior High School finally saw their class-made flatboat on water on Sunday.

U.S. history and social studies teacher Matt Barnett and some friends navigated it from the pedestrian bridge at Riverside Park to roughly 150 yards along the Eel River.

Then they rowed it back, against the current, while some of last year's eighth graders watched their project work as it should.

"It was a great maiden voyage," said Barnett. "It went upstream, which was awesome."

He said the 17-foot-by-7-foot class project is the only working flatboat he knows of, and although it took on a little bit of water during the voyage, it could've stayed on the river for four hours.

A PBS documentarian was interested in it, but he couldn't make it from Oregon, Barnett said.

This was the first large STEM or STEAM (science, technology, engineering, sometimes arts and math) focused project the school attempted, and it was a scaled down version of a flatboat that would've been used by settlers around 1816, when Indiana became a state.

When the eight grade class started building the boat in February 2020 as part of a Barnett and the students originally planned to launch the boat on the Mississinewa Reservoir Lake in May 2020.

But all fields trips got cancelled because of pandemic restrictions.

That delay and the launch being on Sunday dampened some excitement, and only a handful of students showed up.

"I wanted to see it in action," said Lyndsey Norwood, who worked on the boat's design with a computer assisted drawing program.

Trinity Hagen said, "we waited the whole year."

Abbey Hileman said she wanted to watch even if it might not have worked.

"I didn't want to see it fail, but it would've been fun to see," she said. "Watching it go in [to the water] was exciting."

Norwood said that when a teacher recently asked the class if it would float, 95 percent said it wouldn't.

For safety, only adults were on the boat: Barnett, carpenter Delmar Sease (who helped the students build it), Barnett's brother-in-law Andrew Smith and friend Sam Pier.

The students that couldn't make the launch will be able to see videos and drone footage in their classes and online, once it's put together.

It was along project, even without the wait.

"The kids have memories," Barnett said. "That's the most important part."

Norwood remembers "seeing classmates bond."

"I do think it helped us learn more about each other," she said. "Our grade had a lot of fun with it."

Barnett said a lot of the students talked about teamwork.

Hagen said it was one of the more fun things they've done in school but was also hard work doing the CAD design.

"It was fun but aggravating," she said. "I thought about throwing my computer across the room [sometimes]."

She also thinks that it's probably not feasible to build one every year because of the cost, though.

The project was also designed to show connections in learning across the curriculum.

As a STEM project, students learned about buoyancy for science, measuring and figuring for math, reading about it for language arts and building it for Barnett's history class, he said.

As history, a flatboat on the Ohio River could bring entire families, furnishings and livestock to the Hoosier state and were also used to get farm products to New Orleans

Abraham Lincoln would've used in his late teens or early 20s to travel the Mississippi River, said Barnett.

Grants and volunteers helped get the project afloat.

"You can't do a project like this without a community behind you," he said.

The Miami-Cass REMC helped, Mike McCord and McCord's do it Best supplied lumber and Sease donated his time.

There were many others, he added.

Barnett plans to take the boat out once for fishing on the Mississinewa, but after that, the school will find it a good home.

Norwood favors a museum, and Barnett has already turned down requests for the lumber.

His past projects for students included pitching a Civil War camp, building a dugout canoe and trying foods native to Indiana's past. He said he won't do another flatboat.

He also will be doing the projects somewhere else when this school year ends, taking a position at Maconaquah High School in Bunker Hill in the next school year.

Reach James D. Wolf Jr. at james.wolf@pharostribune.com or 574-732-5117

Twitter @JamesDWolfJr