Old Boat Column

The previous installment of the Old Boat Column introduced the steamer Idlewild, built in Pittsburgh in 1914 by the James Rees & Sons Company for the West Memphis Packet… Read More

The James Rees and Sons Company of Pittsburgh began building river craft in the late 1870s. They turned out a wide range of vessels including packets, towboats, snag boats… Read More

The Howards of Jeffersonville, Ind., were known for the beautiful wooden packets they started building in 1834. By the turn of the century, they had created some of the… Read More

In 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court judged Standard Oil Company to be a monopoly and ordered it to be broken up into 34 separate companies. One of these was… Read More

In the July 29 issue of The Waterways Journal, this column detailed the Ductillite, which was the first of a series of three towboats of a radical new design… Read More

The Dravo Contracting Company of Pittsburgh dated back to 1890 and was involved in industrial construction. About 1917, the firm began building floating marine equipment and towboats at a Neville… Read More

With the recent passing of river historian Gerald “Jerry” Sutphin of Huntington, W.Va., the book he co-authored with Richard Andre in 1991, “Sternwheelers On The Great Kanawha River,” came to… Read More

One of the oddest towboats ever to grace the Mississippi River system was a vessel named Pioneer. Not the Dravo-built, single screw of 1934 (The Waterways Journal, March 23, 2022)… Read More

Engine manufacturers have long displayed large front cover ads in The Waterways Journal. Diesel engine ads came to prominence in the 1920s, and throughout that decade it was almost certain… Read More

While Dravo had its innovative new diesel prop boats—such as the Wm. Penn and Ductillite—on the drawing boards, the Inland Waterways Corporation (IWC) was engaged in having three prop towboats… Read More