The American Barge Line' s towboat Inland , which sank while Captain Carpenter was serving on her as steersman. Here the Inland is shown as she was in 1935.
but there are reasons for that. First, the boats are different , with more power and bigger propellers. You couldn 't run the old paddlewheel boats in ice at all ; the ice would just chew them up. I was on a boat one time and we had been tied up in the ice when the captain got in a hurry to go. We got out in it and the ice tore up the wheel in about twenty-five miles . The company sent a truckload of lumber and four carpenters to build a new wheel; and twentyfour hours later they sent the same carpenters and another truckload of lumber back to build the second wheel. Now with bigger boats , you 've got a lot more power to break up the ice, and the ice doesn 't affect the propelJers as much. Another thing is the construction of the hull . A lot of the older boats were wooden-hulled , even in my day . The worst thing for them was real thin skim ice. Going through that was just like taking a knife along the hull. It would cut right through the planking. Floods and Other Problems But as I was saying, the real trouble piloting was the result of flooding. In thirty-two years of piloting , the last trip I made had to be the worst one I ever made. I got into Pittsburgh and it had been pouring down rain. As I went aboard , the office called and said, " We got flood stage here. The lock three miles down is going out of operation in an hour because of the high water." (The river was raising a foot an hour.) ''Can you get the boat out and get down through that lock?'' I said, " No , I can't do that. " "Why can't you?" I said, "Well, I only have half a crew. The groceries and stores haven ' t come aboard yet and everything ... " "Get going! We'll get the crew and the groceries to you some place , some time! Just get out of there!" We got through the locks okay and went down below the locks a couple of miles to where the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company's fleet was. We had taken two empty barges out of the landing with us and delivered them there , and we had to pick up a load or two . Their landing man called up and he said , "Hey, we need some help down here . We got some coal barges down here . The drift is piling up on them and they ' re going to sink. And we don 't have a boat around here ." We were having a three-way conversation on the radio--my office, the Jones and Laughlin man and I-and the office said , " How long do you think it'll take to do the work? " And I said , " Well, from what he ' s telling me, if everything goes right, it'll take two-and-a-half, three hours. " Well , you can't go off and leave a good customer in that kind of situation, so the office said, " Go do it." We started in at eleven o'clock in the morning and at ten o'clock that night we finally got through . By that time the river was clear up over the banks. And I've never seen current like that. We were lucky to find a big steel pier somebody had put in for a chemical dock and we tied up to that for the night. The next night, I changed from the Northern to the Western at Belleville Lock and headed north . I was in front of our house in Belpre, and at midnight I was supposed to change boats and go home . The pilot who was supposed to relieve me called the dispatcher and said that on account of the river being high-it was coming down from the night before-he didn ' t think it was safe to try to board . So I got stuck on that boat for another three days while we headed back up to Pittsburgh . That was my last trip as captain-pilot. .i,
The ABL' s Isthmian aground on a sandbar near Columbus, Kentucky, on the Mississippi in late December, 1935. "We were up therefor ten days, and we had to walk out across the sandbar to get water to wash with. It was down about ten degrees."
The towboats carried all manner of cargos . Here the Ohio Barge line's steam sternwheeler City of Pittsburgh is shown with a tow of eleven barges of finished steel products, two of coal and a lock gate (light gray structure in foreground) for the Panama Canal. Photo courtesy The Waterways Journal.
This article is based on an interview between Captain Carpenter and Lincoln Paine held in December 1986 in Marietta , Ohio .
SEA HISTORY , SPRING 1987
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