".....The new and beautiful steam yacht Octavia -- named after the owner's lady -- has been fitting at Allison's Yard, Jersey City, for ocean as well as coast and sound service. Mr. Allison is finishing her cabins with curled maple, rosewood, holly, satinwood, and other hard woods capable of taking a polish. The mirrors and upholstery work generally will be of the highest possible taste and excellence. The Octavia was built at Cleveland, Ohio, for Mr. Kennard, Superintendent of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad Company, by Mssrs Peck and Masters. She is schooner-rigged, and is constructed in the most substantial manner, entirely of American wood, principally white oak, with combings and finishings of hard pine, cherry, curled maple, black walnut, &c, all of which were transported over the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad. She is of 430 tons burden, 146 feet in length, 25 feet breadth, 14 feet depth, with 250 nominal and 700 actual horsepower. She is calculated to consume at the rate of one and a quarter pounds of coal per horse power per hour, and with two hundred tons of coal on board can make the circuit of the globe. Her propeller is nine feet six inches in diameter, with four feet six inches pitch. Her engines are constructed on an improved plan -- the invention of Mr. Kennard. They are a combination of both the low and high pressure styles -- a union of locomotive and marine descriptions -- making the vessel, with her estimated rate of speed of fourteen to eighteen knots, a sort of locomotive on water. The engines have a surface condenser, calculated to use steam at the rate of seventy-five pounds to the inch. Dimensions of cylinders, high pressure, eighteen by eighteen inches; low pressure , thirty-six by eighteen inches. The cylinders are connected, and move on a beam. The steam first goes into the small cylinder, and, after having performed its functions there, goes into the larger one, and thence into the condenser, where it is returned to the boiler at a temperature of about one hundred and twenty five degrees. The boilers are of the ordinary marine tubular kind, with about two thousand feet heating surface. All the machinery was manufactured at the works of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad Company, Jersey City. The Octavia has two cabins -- the state cabin forward, officers' cabin aft. The state-rooms and saloons are forward, with pantries, closets, store-room, &c, together with a children's nursery, which is supplied with all family conveniences. She can handsomely accommodate about twenty guests, without interfering with the quarters of the officers. Her complement of crew will be fifteen men. Although a purely American notion, being constructed entirely of American material, and her seams sealed as if with some purely American hermetic solution, she will sail under British colours. Mr. Kennard, however, before going to Europe, intends her to pass the coming summer in American waters, where she will doubtless prove an attractive and agreeable feature in our forthcoming regattas and yachting cruises. The Octavia is estimated to be worth $150,000.
[Cleveland & National News Highlights, 1864] The city's first pleasure yacht in the luxury class was launched on September 26 from a Cleveland shipyard. T.W. Kennard, who bought the Angier House, had spent money lavishly on his steam craft, the Octavia, fitting her handsomely and rigging her as a top-sail schooner for ocean travel.
MARINE DISASTERS OF 1869: Schooner Octavia, struck an obstruction at Chicago, and sunk, got up.<
Launching the first steam yacht (in 1864) by S. J. Kelly - about the Octavia, 31.2(1975): 143