SHANTYBOATS
Shaler’s ties to his native state were reaffirmed in 1873, when Kentucky governor Preston H. Leslie (1871–1875) appointed him director of the newly revived Kentucky Geological Survey. Shaler served the Commonwealth of Kentucky in this capacity until 1880, and during those years he undertook the first comprehensive survey of the state’s natural resources, publishing the findings in an 1876 monograph entitled A General Account of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. His work led to the state’s later emergence as a leader in the coal industry. In addition to revitalizing the Kentucky Geological Survey, in 1875 he initiated Harvard’s first summer school for geology and conducted its opening installment at Cumberland Gap in Kentucky. Shaler was also instrumental in revitalizing Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School in 1886 and was appointed dean in 1891, a position he retained for the rest of his life. Shaler vibrant classroom lectures, delivered extemporaneously, conveyed his passion for earth sciences to a nearly 40-year procession of Harvard students. He instructed every undergraduate who entered the university between 1884 and 1891, largely because of the popularity of Geology 4, his introductory geology class. His reputation was mythical among Harvard’s student body, not only because of his teaching abilities but also because of his caring and compassionate demeanor toward his students, especially those who were challenged financially, intellectually, or physically. His students called him “Uncle Nat.” Shaler published a large number of scholarly writings over the course of his long academic career. Yet he wrote on many nonacademic subjects as well. The bibliography of his published works, which lists 29 books and 234 articles, includes an acclaimed introductory textbook, The First Book of Geology (1884); a history of his native state, Kentucky: A Pioneer Commonwealth (1884); and a late-life social trilogy, The Individual (1900), The Citizen (1904), and The Neighbor (1904). His hundreds of articles and essays covered highly diverse topics: a few titles are “On the Formation of Mountain Chains” (1866, natural science), “Race Prejudices” (1886, social philosophy), “The Summer Schools” (1893, education), and “The Dog” (1894, domestic animals). Throughout his life, Shaler’s substantial mental energy was equaled by his physical vigor. Despite his boyhood frailty and lifelong battles with chronic headaches and vertigo, he maintained an ambitious exercise regimen. He often walked up to six miles a day, heedless of adverse weather, and regularly visited the campus gymnasium. In early spring 1906, Shaler set out on foot to visit an ill friend; the ground was still covered with hardpacked snow, which made the return trek very strenuous. Shaler fell ill soon afterward and underwent surgery for appendicitis. He then contracted pneumonia and died April 10, 1906, at his home in Cambridge. He was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. So highly had the Kentucky-born Harvard professor and dean been regarded by the people of Cambridge, his Harvard colleagues, and the stu-
dent body that on the afternoon of his funeral, all flags in the city and on campus hung at half-mast, shops were closed, classes were suspended, and the entire undergraduate student population of both the college and the Scientific School lined both sides of the street from Shaler’s home on Quincy St. to Appleton Chapel on the campus. “Dean Shaler Died Yesterday,” Harvard Crimson, April 11, 1906. Livingstone, David N. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of American Science. Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1987. Purvis, Thomas L., ed. Newport, Kentucky: A Bicentennial History. Newport, Ky.: Otto Zimmerman, 1996. Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate, and Sophia Penn Page Shaler. The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler with a Supplementary Memoir by His Wife. Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1909. Shaler, N. S. Papers, Harvard Univ. Archives, Pusey Library, Harvard Univ., Cambridge, Mass.
Janice Mueller
SHANTYBOATS. The shantyboats and shantyboat communities that used to be scattered along the Ohio, Licking, and Kentucky rivers within the Northern Kentucky region are perhaps best known from literature and film. Ideally, shantyboats were tucked away in protected inlets and backwaters. Families resided within these makeshift floating houses (shanties) on the fringes of the larger river towns, from Maysville to Carrollton and up the Kentucky River to Frankfort. The boats were of all types: oil-drum pontoons, houseboats, and log rafts, tied to the shore wherever they were allowed. They were built of whatever scrap materials could be scavenged. One-story shacks, seldom longer than 30 feet and not much wider than Conestoga wagons, they were mainly homes of low-income persons. Many believe that the shantyboat design was a direct descendant of early Ohio River flatboats. Some shantyboats evolved into somewhat comfortable living quarters, but most did not. Shantyboaters anchored to the shore, paying no property taxes, and sent their children to local schools. They bartered whatever they could collect, often fish, for what they needed from shore. Smoked river-bottom carp was one of their dietary delicacies and trade commodities. The fathers of shantyboat families often were temporary day laborers, but unlike Gypsies, shantyboaters were not transient. Some shantyboat colonies numbered as many as 8 or 10 boats, roped to each other and to the bank. They were visited by floating grocery stores (hucksters) that docked next to them and supplied their needs. These communities once existed at Brent in Campbell Co., at Dayton, at Sandy Hook, on the Newport waterfront between the bridges, in West Covington, and in other more remote spots. Perhaps the most famous Kentucky shantytown was in front of downtown Frankfort along the Kentucky River, where the families of prisoners in the old state penitentiary tied up and remained, an easy walk from the jail for visits. Shantyboaters cooked with grills on the boats, raised chickens, and had small gardens on board. For lo-
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cal officials, they were legal nightmares: jurisdiction over them, ser vices, and so forth were constantly at issue. The shantyboat population seems to have peaked with the Great Depression, when they represented a rent-free housing option. The farther south one traveled, the more shantyboats one saw, since the climate more easily allowed the lifestyle; in contrast, locally, the December 1917 Ohio River ice gorge destroyed much of the local fleet of shantyboats. Beginning with the flood of 1937, which caused unbelievable damage, the shantyboats gradually have almost disappeared. The raising of the Ohio River pool stage in the early 1960s also contributed to their demise, because the higher water level made anchorage more difficult to find. One Brent shantyboat family, on encountering this dilemma, simply moved up the bank and into the attic of the Brent train station of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad (C&O); they managed and cared for the station until the depot closed. Later, housing codes further prompted the wane of shantyboats. As late as the 1970s, Boone Co. area resident Robert Cannon lived on the Ohio River near Rabbit Hash. Cannon, 75 years old in 1976, was a former steamboat captain who once tried living in a city apartment but, unable to sleep, gave it up. He spent his retirement combing the Ohio River from his cypress skiff, seeking aluminum he could sell as junk and other salable flotsam. Cannon was also a hunter and trapper; possum skins brought him $3 each. In the 1980s, Walter Harding, in his sixties, and his live-in friend, 30-something Helen Beck, lived in a shantyboat along the Newport bank of the Licking River, just south of the C&O Bridge. The D. Krischner and Sons scrap yard nearby allowed them to remain there. Harding’s dogs were tied up outside on the bank, to warn of visitors and to ward off the rats coming out of the junkyard’s scrap piles. Harding paid the government $10 annually for the license on his boat. In literature, the shantyboater population appears often in the works of Covington’s Ben Lucien Burman. His many books about river life are peppered with savory and unsavory characters from the shantyboat era. Other local literary figures who popu larized the shantyboat were the independent-minded Harlan and Anna Hubbard and Gallatin Co.’s Dr. Carl Bogardus. The motion picture Tammy and the Bachelor, which was the 1957 movie of the year, and its theme song etched the shantyboat lifestyle into the minds of viewers. The heroine, Tammy, played by Debbie Reynolds, was the beautiful poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks, the local shantyboat community, who fell for a young man from another social class. “Tammy, Tammy, Tammy’s in love,” goes the song. Dickey Lee referred to the social stigma that came with a shanty address in his 1962 popu lar hit song “Patches”: “Down by the river . . . there lives a girl everybody calls Patches, Patches my darling of old shanty town.” Much like Tammy, she fell in love with a boy from the other end of town, but the relationship ended tragically.