Towboat on the Ohio
Towboat on the Ohio

Author: James E. Casto

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-07-11

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0813150698

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To get a personal look at what it is like to work on the Ohio River, newspaperman James E. Casto spent eight days aboard the Blazer as it traveled the Ohio from Huntington, West Virginia, to Pittsburgh, up the Allegheny and the Mongahela, and then back to Huntington. The Paul G. Blazer, a gleaming white towboat owned and operated by Ashland Oil, pushes a group—or "tow," as the rivermen call it—of nine barges on this trip. Along the way, Casto introduces us to Captain Ronnie Davis, pilot Ronnie Burge, engineer Steve Bellomy, the mates, the deckhands, and the cook, as well as the river itself, the life and the beauty that are the Ohio. Interwoven with the narrative of the trip upriver and back is the history of commerce on the Ohio—of how the flatboats and keelboats gave way to the steamboats and how, in turn, the steamboats were replaced by today's powerful, diesel-powered boats such as the Blazer. Mark Twain wrote that the Mississippi had a new story to tell every day. The same can be said of the Ohio. As engaging as it is informative, Towboat on the Ohio tells one of the many stories of the busy, hardworking Ohio River.

The Ohio River
The Ohio River

Author: Rick Rhodes

Publisher: Heron Island Media

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780966586633

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The Ohio River—In American History and Voyaging on Today's Riveralso addresses the Allegheny, Monongahela, Kanawha, Muskingum, Kentucky, Green, and Wabash Rivers. More than 300 years of American History are woven into this book, including the French and Indian War, the American Revolution in the West, our country's expansion into the Northwest Territories, Lewis and Clark on the Ohio River, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, the Steamboat Era, The evolution of the current lock and dam system, and rise and decline of twentieth and twenty-first century river industries, as well as the colorful local histories of 200 river towns. This work also contains 27 river locality sketches and 85 photographs. Eleven appendices list more than 60 river festivals, 59 locks and dams, hundreds of marinas and restaurants, scores of free docks, plus much more. Aspects of safely boating on the rivers, how to prudently negotiate through locks and dams, and appreciating the commercial towboat operators are also discussed.

Way's Steam Towboat Directory
Way's Steam Towboat Directory

Author: Frederick Way (Jr.)

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780821420751

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After the initial release in 1983 of Way's Packet Directory, 1848-1983, the demand was enormous for a similar treatment of the steam towboats that once populated the Mississippi River System. Captain Frederick Way, Jr., aided by Joseph W. Rutter, gathered together this wealth of information concerning steamboats that shoved river barges laden with coal, petroleum products, chemicals, sand, gravel, and similar bulk commodities from the headwaters of the Ohio River to the jetties of the Mississippi. The steam towboats that performed these services have completely disappeared from the scene, their places having been taken by hundreds of modern diesel-propeller towboats, but this thorough and remarkable reference guide helps preserve their history.

The Seven Ranges
The Seven Ranges

Author: Will Hoyt

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2021-03-01

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1725287358

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When Surveyor-General Thomas Hutchins drove a stake into the ground to mark a “point of beginning” for the 1785 establishment of Seven Ranges of townships on the west bank of the Ohio River, he had to have sensed that he was initiating something larger than a survey. After all, he was working for the newly formed United States, and the purpose of his work was to impose a grid of ideal squares on hill country to make it ready for sale—something that had never been done before. But Hutchins couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination have known that the public survey system he was testing would soon extend all the way to the Pacific or that the land on which he worked would soon become the staging ground for other, similarly revolutionary innovations like strip mining, Pentecostalism, the gaming industry, and tools for emancipating multi-national corporations. In this book, Will Hoyt details the arrival and eventual impact of these eastern Ohio products, and by framing the story of their development within the story of his own decision to move from California to eastern Ohio, he secures a glimpse of our country’s DNA. Readers will close this book with a firm grasp of three things: the grandeur of the American project, the extent to which that project is now at risk, and what we all must do to ensure its survival.

Western Rivermen, 1763–1861
Western Rivermen, 1763–1861

Author: Michael R. Allen

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 1994-04-01

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780807119075

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Western Rivermen, the first documented sociocultural history of its subject, is a fascinating book. Michael Allen explores the rigorous lives of professional boatmen who plied non-steam vessels—flatboats, keelboats, and rafts—on the Ohio and lower Mississippi rivers from 1763-1861. Allen first considers the mythical “half horse, half alligator” boatmen who were an integral part of the folklore of the time. Americans of the Jacksonian and pre-Civil War period perceived the rivermen as hard-drinking, straight-shooting adventurers on the frontier. Their notions were reinforced by romanticized portrayals of the boatmen in songs, paintings, newspaper humor, and literature. Allen contends that these mythical depictions of the boatmen were a reflection of the yearnings of an industrializing people for what they thought to be a simpler time. Allen demonstrates, however, that the actual lives of the rivermen little resembled their portrayals in popular culture. Drawing on more than eighty firsthand accounts—ranging from a short letter to a four-volume memoir—he provides a rounded view of the boatmen that reveals the lonely, dangerous nature of their profession. He also discusses the social and economic aspects of their lives, such as their cargoes, the river towns they visited, and the impact on their lives of the steamboat and advancing civilization. Allen’s comprehensive, highly informative study sheds new light on a group of men who played an important role in the development of the trans-Appalachian West and the ways in which their lives were transformed into one of the enduring themes of American folk culture.

Steamboats on the Western Rivers
Steamboats on the Western Rivers

Author: Louis C. Hunter

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 2012-04-30

Total Pages: 721

ISBN-13: 0486157784

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Richly detailed definitive account covers every aspect of steamboat's development — from construction, equipment, and operation to races, collisions, rise of competition, and ultimate decline of steamboat transportation.

The Pioneers
The Pioneers

Author: David McCullough

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Published: 2019-05-07

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1501168681

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The #1 New York Times bestseller by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David McCullough rediscovers an important chapter in the American story that’s “as resonant today as ever” (The Wall Street Journal)—the settling of the Northwest Territory by courageous pioneers who overcame incredible hardships to build a community based on ideals that would define our country. As part of the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain recognized the new United States of America, Britain ceded the land that comprised the immense Northwest Territory, a wilderness empire northwest of the Ohio River containing the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. A Massachusetts minister named Manasseh Cutler was instrumental in opening this vast territory to veterans of the Revolutionary War and their families for settlement. Included in the Northwest Ordinance were three remarkable conditions: freedom of religion, free universal education, and most importantly, the prohibition of slavery. In 1788 the first band of pioneers set out from New England for the Northwest Territory under the leadership of Revolutionary War veteran General Rufus Putnam. They settled in what is now Marietta on the banks of the Ohio River. McCullough tells the story through five major characters: Cutler and Putnam; Cutler’s son Ephraim; and two other men, one a carpenter turned architect, and the other a physician who became a prominent pioneer in American science. They and their families created a town in a primeval wilderness, while coping with such frontier realities as floods, fires, wolves and bears, no roads or bridges, no guarantees of any sort, all the while negotiating a contentious and sometimes hostile relationship with the native people. Like so many of McCullough’s subjects, they let no obstacle deter or defeat them. Drawn in great part from a rare and all-but-unknown collection of diaries and letters by the key figures, The Pioneers is a uniquely American story of people whose ambition and courage led them to remarkable accomplishments. This is a revelatory and quintessentially American story, written with David McCullough’s signature narrative energy.