As many do, the course of the Missouri River has changed throughout time. The Hawley family’s course changed as well when stories about steamboat hunting from a business client inspired David Hawley, now Arabia excavator and museum manager, to hunt for the buried treasure of the Arabia. While Hawley fixed his client’s furnace on a service call, the client told him stories about searching for steamboats. Hawley left the call ready to start his own adventure.

“I checked out boat books at the library and I’ve been looking for ‘em ever since,” Hawley said. “The Arabia was one of many that sank on the river.”

After researching and test-drilling to find the exact site, Hawley located the Steamboat Arabia. It was buried under fertile northeastern Kansas farmland that bordered the Missouri River.

“At the time my brother and I had kind of a young family, little kids growing up and doing all the things that young families do, and taking on a big steamboat project like that was a lot to take on,” Hawley said. “But it was exciting, it was fun. ... It was all-consuming, and we loved that too.”

Following the discovery of the sunken Arabia came months of careful digging, dewatering and demudding. Hawley hired an Iowa mining company to build the equipment necessary to clear out the ground water. The work took place during the winter, because the heavy trucks required the frozen farmland to be able to cross the two miles between the county road and the dig site. Then treasures began appearing from beneath layers of thick Kansas mud.

“One day we found cases of pie fillings and I took pictures of those,” Hawley said. “[I] realized that was the first color photograph ever taken by any photographer anywhere ... of a pre-Civil War blueberry or pre-Civil War cherry ... that was like time travel.”

Barrel after barrel, crate after crate, the Arabia revealed more of its wonders, all 200 tons of them.

“It was a fully loaded, 1850s steamboat,” Hawley said. “You don’t see that anywhere … None of us around today were around when the steamboats traveled, and none of us have ever seen a steamboat unload, so we don’t have a sense of the huge volume they carried.”

The exhumed items now fill the Steamboat Arabia Museum and invite visitors to step into 1856. Tour guide Paula Rose directs visitors around the first part of the museum, providing an introduction to the time period and the Arabia itself before leaving the group to explore the carefully preserved artifacts for themselves.

“I think people get really excited just when they see the vast quantity of objects,” Rose said. “Some of the technological innovations that they didn’t know existed in the 19th century.”

Row upon row of doorknobs and dresses, pickles and pins line the walls, along with approximations of the lives of those typically traveling by steamboat in the 1850s — merchants, families and crew. A replicated general store and dining room display some of the everyday items in their practical 1800s use. Personal objects like buttons and dolls that westward bound settlers brought with them evoke a sense of frontier life in the museum, although the artifacts have not been used for over a century.

Keith Nelson, a first-time visitor from St. Louis, found the quality of the items displayed intriguing.

“They have the brown doorknobs that are very ornate and they’re really nice looking,” Nelson said. “I was really surprised how good of shape they were in. That and the old padlocks are neat.”

Amid the vast quantities of cargo, large steamboat parts placed throughout the museum offer a glimpse into the mechanics of an 1850s steamboat. The original paddle wheel churns water in a pool, echoing sounds from the Missouri River.

The Steamboat Arabia Museum boasts repeat visitors along with visitors from around the world, each with their own individual enthusiasm for the time period. David Hawley, Arabia excavator and museum manager, has seen visitors find niche interests in the wide array of cargo displayed.

“People who collect things tend to gravitate to those things they collect, like sewing people go to sewing supplies — the buttons, the needles — tool guys go to the tools,” Hawley said. “For everything we’ve found, there’s a group that collects it.”

Some visitors have an interest as specific as counting how many threads per inch were in the fabric at that time in history, Hawley said. Civil War re-enactors also come to study the collection.

To ensure visitors can enjoy the artifacts for years to come, the museum uses meticulous preservation methods. Keeping the items in top shape started from day one of the winter excavation. Bringing the items out of the ground into cold air minimized damages.

The artifacts require further preservation to prevent deterioration when exposed to oxygen. Hawley said the preservation methods vary in manner and difficulty, depending on the item.

“If you’ve got just leather, or just wood or just fabrics then, you know, that’s not tough,” Hawley said. “But when you have dissimilar items like a gun... To take it apart would mean damaging the artifact. So now you’ve got to work on two much different types of material, but at the same time.”

Hawley said the preservation of all the contents of the Arabia will take a total of about 30 years to complete, with about 10 years still to go. Those items waiting to be eternalized sit in blocks of ice in a room the size of a railroad caboose.

“We found 5,000 shoes on the boat,” Hawley said. “It takes four months each to do those.”

Hawley said they are looking for a larger space to house the entire bulk of the objects and to display some of the bigger items like pre-fabricated houses — items that do not fit in the current museum space. But in the meantime, the museum offers an aesthetic slice of life from 1856.

“Museums need to be educational, but they also need to be entertaining,” Hawley said. “We have 20,000 school kids come through throughout the year... they get a sense of what life was like 150 years ago.”

The museum even houses the fateful snag, an acknowledgement that because of it, all the cargo and all the stories of Steamboat Arabia did not reach their intended destinations. Instead, they laid in wait for the right man with the right passion to exhume, preserve and exhibit them for visitors for years to come.