Ohio History Journal

RIVER NAMESAKES OF THE STATE OF OHIO

 

by CAPT. FREDERICK WAY, JR.

 

It is quite probable that no one will know precisely how many

steamboats of the western rivers were named to honor the state

of Ohio. A share, at least, of those named Ohio honor the river

they plied, and not the state. Actually, in only one isolated case

is it possible to be sure the state of Ohio was honored, and not the

river. That is the steam towboat Ohio, built in 1930 for the Standard

Unit Navigation Company. We know this one honors the state

because her sister vessels are the Tennessee, Indiana, and Louisiana,

all state names.

There are three vessels on the Mississippi River system today

named Ohio, of which the above mentioned is the largest. The

other two, one a ferryboat and the other a tug, seem to be named

for the river.

There have been an amazing number of steamboats named Ohio

since the inception of steam navigation (1811) on the rivers of

the Mississippi system, which, to go back to old-style usage, we

will call the Western Waters. Boats of this name were constructed

in fair regularity. One was running in the 1830's, another in 1842.

One was built at Cincinnati in 1849, and was succeeded by the

Ohio No. 2 in 1855. She, in turn, was succeeded by the Ohio No. 3

in 1858, and the Ohio No. 4 came out in 1868. A large stern-

wheeler ran between Cincinnati, Memphis, and New Orleans in

the 1880's named Ohio. A small towboat of the name was built

at Cincinnati in 1899. Then, at Marietta, Ohio, in 1908 the steamer

Avalon was renamed Ohio, and the next year, at the same city, a

new packet was built named Ohio. A ferry built at Paducah,

Kentucky, in 1924 bore the name, and was followed by an Ohio

No. 2 a few years later.

In addition to these, there were two packets called Ohio Belle

back in the 1840's and 1850's, and another in the 1860's which

was sold south to become the Alabama Belle. There was an Ohio

Mail in the 1840's. A freight boat built at Metropolis, Illinois, was

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284    Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

named Ohio Mills in 1876. The Knox yard at Harmar, Ohio, built

an Ohio Valley in 1863. Capt. William Bainbridge Miller, a native

of Austinburg, Ohio, bought the Civil War gunboat Ibex in 1865

and renamed it Ohio Valley. Earlier still there was an Ohio Valley,

built in 1841, for the Cincinnati-New Orleans trade.

It cannot be said with certainty that any of these were named for

the state, and it is quite possible the owners were not too sure

themselves.

There can be no such doubt, however, about the three handsome

packets named Buckeye State. These were named to honor the

sovereign state. They appeared in the years 1850, 1878, and 1883,

respectively. Each made an indelible mark in river lore, and tales

still are told in pilothouses about them.

The original Buckeye State was one of a line of combination

passenger and freight boats which operated between Cincinnati and

Pittsburgh before the time those cities were connected by rail.

In 1850, when this Buckeye State appeared "on the track," there

was daily service between those two ports, including Sundays.

Punctually at 11 A.M. a line steamer backed away from Pittsburgh

for Cincinnati. Similarly, at 10 A.M. daily one of the boats cleared

Cincinnati for the upriver terminal. This service required seven

side-wheelers, as one week was necessary for the round trip. This

schedule was maintained during favorable river stages from 1842

through the spring of 1856, by which time the rail connections

had made such inroads that the line was abandoned. The life of

the ordinary steamboat on Western Waters in 1850 was reckoned

at five years, for during the existence of the Pittsburgh & Cincinnati

Packet Line some twenty or twenty-five boats in all were used

over the fourteen-year period. The Buckeye State was the most

famed of the lot.

Inasmuch as a great bulk of the trade consisted of getting

passengers from one port to another at the fastest possible speed,

the Buckeye State and her sister boats were built primarily with that

thought in mind. It was no uncommon event for the Buckeye State

to leave Pittsburgh at 11 A.M. on a Sunday morning and discharge

her passengers at Cincinnati before dark on Monday evening. The

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River Namesakes of the State of Ohio       285

upstream voyage usually required from fifty to sixty hours, in-

cluding all stops. It was usual to land at least sixty times en route

to handle business, and to make perhaps three or four additional

stops for fuel.

With speed so accented, rivalry between various boats was

heated and spirited, and the steamer which "carried the horns" was

high in popular esteem. At the time the Buckeye State was built,

the fastest upstream run from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh had been

made in December 1847 by a steamer named Telegraph No. 2.

She came up in 44 hours, 47 minutes. This record was a challenge,

especially because the Telegraph No. 2 was an "outsider," owned

in Louisville and run in competition with the established line of

boats between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Several attempts were

made to beat the record of the Telegraph, but with no success. The

Buckeye State was built with fine lines and enormous engine and

boiler power for the express purpose of returning the laurels

where they belonged-to the upper Ohio River.

The construction of this boat was superintended by a Pittsburgher,

David Holmes. The hull was laid at the E. & N. Porter Shipyard

at Shousetown, Pennsylvania, a small village on the Ohio River

about sixteen miles below Pittsburgh. The place is now known

as Glenwillard, and all traces of the boat-building industry are

gone. Yet there was a time when, at this hamlet, there was con-

structed the most fabulous of all Mississippi steamers, the Great

Republic, in the winter of 1866-67. The Porter yard, operated by

two brothers, Ezra and Nathan, built hulls and cabin framing (as

was usual practice for many years in the Pittsburgh vicinity) and

sent the new boats in uncompleted state to Pittsburgh for engines,

boilers, cabins, painting, and the finishing touches.

On February 17, 1850, the Buckeye State made her maiden trip,

and made it under strained circumstances. A rival, independent

steamer, the Cincinnati, elected to compete on an identical schedule.

Both boats whipped up and down the river for a month. The

anxiety caused the original captain of the Buckeye State, Samuel J.

Reno, one of the popular commanders of the day, to become ill.

He was taken ashore at Cincinnati and removed to the Broadway

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286    Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

Hotel, where he died within a day or so. His body was brought to

Pittsburgh aboard the Buckeye State, which was draped in mourning

for the occasion.

Captain Reno had intended a "speed trial" with the new boat,

but due to the competition he was forced to fight, plus some un-

favorable river conditions and his own fatal illness, he went to his

grave not knowing the outcome.

The command of the boat was given over to Capt. Sam Dean

of Martins Ferry, Ohio, an uncle of William Dean Howells.

Sam Dean vowed he would vindicate the dead commander and

win the victory. On May 1, 1850, he gave the word and the

Buckeye State, without freight to burden her and with two hundred

passengers aboard, left Cincinnati "at railroad speed" with the

sole purpose of getting up the Ohio River as fast as possible. In

exactly twenty-four hours she was at Belpre, Ohio, and twenty-

four miles ahead of the Telegraph No. 2's time. When thirty-six

hours were out, she was in Brown's Island above Steubenville,

and in forty-three hours even, she arrived in Pittsburgh. She whipped

the Telegraph's time by one hour and forty-seven minutes. She did

more than that. In the century which has elapsed since May 2,

1850, no boat has equaled the record! No boat has come within

gunshot of it! Due to altered conditions on the river nowadays,

with permanent locks which must be used, it is quite likely that

no commercial steamer or vessel will surpass the ancient speed

record of the Buckeye State.

This boat continued in the trade between Cincinnati and Pitts-

burgh through the spring season of 1856, shortly after which

she was taken to the wreckers and dismantled. She carried thousands

and thousands of people, many of them going west for the Gold

Rush. She had several accidents in her career, all of them minor in

character, but for the most part she did her job well. This author

saw mention in an old Wheeling newspaper that in October 1850

Capt. Dean offered to take up the Ohio River, aboard his Buckeye

State, the stone selected by the state of Ohio to go in the Washington

Monument. Further reference could not be located, but it would

be interesting to know whether the vessel contributed this per-

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River Namesakes of the State of Ohio      287

manent share to the state's and the nation's history. In any event,

a century ago, she carried two hundred persons from Cincinnati

to Pittsburgh faster than man ever had traveled between those two

cities before-and faster than rivermen ever have traveled up that

river since.

The pilots on that fast trip appear to have been two Ohio persons.

The author says "appear" guardedly, for the only account of the

crew handed down to this generation comes from the recollections

of an old riverman. One of the pilots was Capt. Tom Witten,

whose family located on a farm along the Ohio River about midway

between Sardis and Matamoras, Ohio, in 1793. The Witten family

continues to occupy the farm today. The other probably was

William Clark of Portsmouth. Tom Witten's participation is fairly

certain, as several accounts mention him; they say that he dis-

tinguished himself as the boat passed under the Wheeling sus-

pension bridge (then the only span over the Ohio River) by

mounting a life-size model of a reindeer which had been placed on

top of the pilothouse. Tom Witten got up that reindeer, doffed

his silk hat to the crowd, and let out a spontaneous cheer as the

boat sailed under the span.

The reindeer was put on the boat as a symbol of superlative

speed. The usual adornment of river boats of that day were gilded

deer horns, and the boat that "wore the horns" was acknowledged

the champion. She was allowed to retain them only so long as her

record was unbeaten. The story about the reindeer being mounted

on the Buckeye State's pilothouse was a hard one for this historian

to track down. The tale first came to him by letter, as an elderly

riverman recounted what he had heard as a youth while living

around Wheeling. The Pittsburgh Dispatch of May 6, 1850, how-

ever, proved the existence of the deer. There a brief note reads:

"The Buckeye State went out yesterday with the horns away forward

of the chimney derricks and the deer still spread out on the pilot-

house." Shortly after locating the Dispatch item, one day at the

offices of the Dravo Corporation, Neville Island, Pennsylvania,

the author paused to gaze at an ancient lithograph of Pittsburgh

made in 1851. There, steaming up the Monongahela River, big

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288    Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

as life, was the old side-wheeler Buckeye State, and, on top of her

pilothouse, the deer! There surely was a buck on the Buckeye State!

The second steamer on the Ohio River to bear the name Buckeye

State was a stern-wheeler built in 1878. The hull was constructed

at Freedom, Pennsylvania, not far below little Shousetown where

the first old boat was put up. She was launched on Saturday,

July 20, and was towed to Pittsburgh in uncompleted shape by

the steamer Park Painter, which had quite a time of it due to low

water. She stuck on a particularly notorious riffle of the time

called "The Trap" and had to ask the owners of the towboat

Kangaroo to come to her assistance. Finally, between the two of

them, they got the new hull around to the shops of James Rees

& Sons Company, in the mouth of the Allegheny River, where the

boat was completed. Like her predecessor, she was entered in the

Cincinnati-Pittsburgh passenger and freight trade. She was owned

by a stock concern: Capt. William M. Rees of Pittsburgh, Capt.

Wash H. Kerr of Portsmouth, and Capt. Wash Honshell of

Catlettsburg, Kentucky, each owned a one-quarter interest, and

the remaining shares were owned by Capt. T. T. Johnston and

Jacob Ensinger of Ironton, Ohio, and Shadrick Ward of Ashland,

Kentucky. This boat was somewhat of an innovation in the river

world inasmuch as she sported an iron paddlewheel.

The new Buckeye State joined the Pittsburgh & Cincinnati Packet

Line and ran in the trade along with the steamers Emma Graham,

Katie Stockdale, and Scotia. The design of this packet was con-

sidered so successful from all standpoints that several duplicates

were constructed for Volga River service and another for traffic

on the Don. These vessels, although somewhat shorter in length,

were equipped with identical engines and similar cabin outfitting.

Steamboats sometimes have odd things happen, and the second

Buckeye State nearly was struck by a meteor on July 30, 1879. She

was downbound at the time, in the first bend below Ripley, Ohio,

and the pilot on watch was Eph Talbot. He saw the night sky

illuminate to a brilliant purple and chanced to look back to deter-

mine the cause, when a sizzling missile from outer space whistled

on a long slant downriver, right by the pilothouse, and landed in

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River Namesakes of the State of Ohio     289

the river ahead of the steamboat. The captain emerged from his

texas room in his long underwear to see what the commotion was,

and Eph pointed to an agitated place in the river, now nearly

alongside, where the water was hissing and boiling.

A lively packet traffic developed between Pittsburgh and St.

Louis in the early 1880's and the Buckeye State was entered in this

lengthy run. While so engaged and while being piloted by Capt.

Henry Nye, she struck a pier at the head of the Louisville Canal

and sank. The wrecked boat was bought by a partnership, and much

of the equipment salvaged. A new and larger hull was built at

Cincinnati in 1883, the new vessel being named also Buckeye State.

She was jointly owned by Capts. Rees, Honshell, and Thornburg,

the latter gentleman being a native of Barboursville, West Vir-

ginia. This steamer spent most of her career in the Cincinnati,

Memphis, and New Orleans trade, and burned while so engaged

at Barfield Point, Arkansas. The pilot on watch, William Stricker,

and also the engineer, Jack Robinson, stuck to their posts, brought

the burning steamer to land, and got the passengers safely ashore.

In early steamboat days there were two packets named Buckeye

Belle, which, one may surmise, were named for the state of Ohio.

The original one, built at Marietta in 1849, was designed for service

on the Muskingum River. While going through the lock at Beverly,

Ohio, on November 12, 1852, both boilers exploded and demolished

the boat. Twenty persons, including the pilot, were killed and

fourteen others were injured. Thirteen unidentified dead were

buried in the Beverly cemetery along with a box containing frag-

ments of human flesh. A monument later was erected there to

honor the pilot, Calvin R. Stull, by his grandson Edward M. Ayres.

This was the worst river calamity to happen along the Muskingum.

The second Buckeye Belle, perhaps built on the hull of its ill-

starred predecessor, ran between Pittsburgh and Portsmouth in

1854 and later went to the lower Ohio and the Mississippi and

was running between Mound City, Illinois, and Hickman, Ken-

tucky, as late as the fall of 1857.

The Buckeye Boy also was a namesake, without doubt. She was

a smallish towboat built at Malta, Ohio, by Capt. Diodate Morgan

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290    Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

in 1886. She was used in towing salt from Pomeroy Bend to

Cincinnati, and later she towed crossties out of the Tennessee

River. Eventually she burned at South Point, Ohio, about 1892.

There is a record of a boat which was to have been named for

the state of Ohio, and never was! Capt. M. W. Beltzhoover of

Pittsburgh, along with Capt. Richard C. Gray and David Holmes

(the same gentleman who built the first, fast Buckeye State) con-

structed a modest stern-wheel packet at Brownsville, Pennsylvania,

in 1853. This team announced to the newspapers it was going

to call the boat Young Buckeye. The Young Buckeye was to run

between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh when the water was too low

for the larger Buckeye State. However, the officials of the Penn-

sylvania Railroad, seeking boats to connect their line with the

Wellsville & Cleveland Railroad from Pittsburgh, interfered with

the plans for the Young Buckeye. The railroad acquired the boat

with two or three others and gave her the name Latrobe. She sank

at Phillis Island in the Ohio River, in severe ice, February 16, 1855.

The series of four packets named successively Ohio, Ohio No. 2,

Ohio No. 3, and Ohio No. 4 rightfully claim some expansion of

detail here, inasmuch as they were operated by Ohio persons,

principally, and long played important roles out of Ohio ports on

the Ohio River. The original was constructed at Cincinnati in 1849

and apparently operated in long runs to New Orleans. Lloyd's

Directory recounts a collision with the steamer W. B. Clifton on the

Mississippi River, April 2, 1854, wherein the latter was sunk and

seven deck passengers drowned. The Ohio No. 2 was built at the

Knox yard, Harmar, in 1855. She ran regularly between Marietta

and Cincinnati, commanded by Capt. J. J. Blagg of Gallipolis,

Ohio, and later by Capt. Daniel F. Sayre of Marietta. The Ohio

No. 3 was also built at the Knox yard in 1858. For a few years

the Ohio No. 2 and Ohio No. 3 were both in operation. It was not

until September 6, 1860, that the older boat struck a snag at the

head of Blennerhassett Island and sank. The account of this sink-

ing reports the vessel a "total loss," but the hull must have been

raised, for there is a record of her charter to the United States as

a receiving ship for recruits at Cincinnati on July 4, 1861. The

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River Namesakes of the State of Ohio       291

boys who signed up on board were being instructed for gunboat

service.

Capt. J. J. Blagg came out master on the Ohio No. 3 in the

Marietta-Cincinnati run. This boat was elegantly furnished for her

day and boasted hot and cold running water in some of the state-

rooms. She was a side-wheel vessel which measured 218 feet in

length, was 35 feet wide of hull, and was rated at 650 tons capacity.

There were thirty-two staterooms in the forward cabin and twelve

in the ladies' cabin. She continued in the trade until replaced by

the Ohio No. 4 in 1868. Colonel Harry D. Knox of Marietta once

informed this writer that the old Ohio No. 3 was dismantled at

the Knox yard in Harmar, and her old hull soon afterward was

cut down by ice and stranded on the riverbank. It lay there a long

time and finally during successive high stages of water was covered

with sand.

The Ohio No. 4 was the most pretentious of the series, being

242 feet long and 37 feet beam, and boasted engines with a cylinder

diameter of 22 inches and a 7-foot stroke. She also ran in the

Marietta-Cincinnati trade, remaining there until at least 1875 or

1876. The White Collar Line of Cincinnati purchased her, and

she then made the Cincinnati-Pomeroy run until she literally died

of old age. It would appear her last activity was in 1881. She

finally sank at Cincinnati and her wreck was cleared out during

the low water of the summer of 1882.

The latter-day stern-wheel packet Ohio, built from the steamer

Avalon, was also owned largely in Marietta and Gallipolis and ran

between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. She was entered in this trade in

1908 and continued through 1913. Capt. Martin F. Noll of Marietta

was a stockholder, and Capt. Edwin F. Maddy of Gallipolis long

commanded her.

This account is restricted to namesakes which plied the Mis-

sissippi River system, and takes no notice of some large lake and

ocean vessels which have honored the state from time to time.

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