John Fitch tested a model steamboat near here in 1785 and, before his death in 1798, built four mechanically successful steamboats. The first in the U.S., they proved financial failures, leaving final success of the idea to Robert Fulton. Adjacent, a stone marker says that John Fitch here conceived the idea of the first steamboat and ran a boat with side wheels by steam on a pond below Davisville in 1785.