This is an excerpt from a 1949 letter written by Capt. Tom Greene, owner of Greene Line Steamers, to his friend Dan Heekin, a Cincinnati industrialist and river buff. The letter was discovered tucked in a copy of Steamboats & Steamboatmen by Ellis C. Mace. “I have about decided to put the CHRIS GREENE’S whistle [...]
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Stories, quotes and anecdotes.
Tag Archives: Ohio River
Feb
03
Sixty years of change in Ironton Ohio
Los Angeles, February 6, 1934 Editor Tribune: Sixty years have passed since the writer answered an advertisement in the columns of The Tribune’s honored predecessor, The Ironton Register, resulting in his employment as a boy in the Register office. That was on February 6, 1874. I remained in the service of the Register twenty-seven years, [...]
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Aug
11
‘My name is Mike Fink!’ was the curt reply
He was the most famous of the keelboatmen, who plied the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers for two decades until they and their watercraft were displaced by steamboats. Born near Pittsburgh, PA (at the headwaters of the Ohio River), around 1770, Mike Fink —‘Miche Phinck,’ as he learned to spell it from his French Canadian parents—gained [...]
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Jul
21
They’d get up and swing around on the trapeze
“Well I’ll tell you I came from up in Washington County. Washington County, Ohio. Lived up in the country there with my grandmother. My mother died when I was a little fellow and I lived with my grandmother. Lived up there in the country and all you could see was the steamboats. There was nothing [...]
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Jul
29
When there was no work many men worked at the drifting
A great many people in Ekeyville owned their own small boat, a skiff or johnboat. The johnboat is a flat bottomed affair with one set of oar locks and square in the stern. The skiff comes to a sharp bow and a gradual tapering to the stern and generally has two sets of oar locks. [...]
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