I Wonder as I Wander: The Life of John Jacob Niles

Chapter 1. The Families Gather at the River

1 The Families Gather at the River The drama unfolds in the former city of Portland, Kentucky, in the early years of the nineteenth century.1 Portland was strategically located right below three miles of rocky shoals known as the Falls of the Ohio and just to the west of the neighboring city of Louisville.2 During summer months, when the Ohio River was at low stage, boats going upstream from ports along the Mississippi and the Ohio were compelled to disembark at Portland’s Commercial Street (now Thirty-fourth Street) wharf and move overland around the falls to Louisville. Likewise, boats headed downstream from Louisville had to transfer their goods overland and reembark at Portland to continue their trip. Portland sang in a vivid welter of contending voices: the penetrating whoosh of whistles as steamboats navigated the locks in the canal; the clamor of stevedores shouting to one another as they worked the rasping block and tackles; the hollow cacophony of horses’ hooves on the cobblestone wharf; the great iron lungs of the Fischer-Leaf Foundry echoing across to the din raised by the Louisville Cement quarries strung out along Shippingport Island, and the grinding and halting of locomotives as they hauled their goods through the rail yards and clattered across the bridge to New Albany, Indiana. Portland was becoming a thriving community whose economic opportunity and river access enticed many immigrants from Germany and Ireland to settle there. Grand homes such as magistrate Squire Earick’s house on Commercial Street or steamboat captain William Campbell’s 10 I Wonder as I Wander house along Rudd Avenue gazed out over the river, while brick and frame shotgun houses with side porches lined streets such as Portland Avenue or Bank Street. The grand St. Charles Hotel dominated the bustling waterfront , where the cobblestones were stacked with bales of cotton and tobacco, hogsheads of molasses and sugar, and crates of factory-produced wares. The city was a hive of distilleries, foundries, convents, saloons, schools, churches, mercantile shops, banks, warehouses, a vast cement factory, rail yards, lumberyards, furniture factories, and a horse-drawn ferry that crossed the river to New Albany. The very success of the port sowed the seeds of its demise. The inconvenience and financial cost of transportation to circumvent the falls finally compelled the city to build a canal around the falls connecting Portland directly to Louisville. The project, spearheaded by James Guthrie , was chartered in 1825, and construction began a year later. On December 22, 1830, the first boat passed through the 1.9-mile-long canal. In 1871 the canal was enlarged to accommodate the volume of traffic and the expanded size of the ships, but this also had the unfortunate effect of eventually bypassing Portland entirely. As the waterfront wharves and warehouses gradually became silent, John Jacob Niles’s ancestors started assembling in Portland. The Ancestors At his seventy-seventh birthday concert in Cincinnati, Niles spoke of his great-grandfather Adams, “a piano manufacturer and a player of Bach and Buxtehude. He moved up and down the Ohio Valley, from Pittsburgh to Cairo. He tuned organs and pianos after the War Between the States had destroyed his business. He tuned, and he played Bach and Buxtehude [and] he made a magnificent piano.”3 This great-grandfather was born Jhan Engelbert in Prussia in 1808. A musician, woodworker, and carver, he immigrated to the United States and settled in Portland, Kentucky , where he established a piano building and tuning business as early as 1832.4 He met Sarah Graff, who had been born in Alsace-Lorraine in 1826, and on February 15, 1848, the two were married by Joseph Potter at Louisville.5 By then, Engelbert had Americanized his name to John E. Adams; he retained his surname as a middle initial and took Adams as his The Families Gather at the River 11 last name, in a nod to President John Quincy Adams (1767–1848). Sarah had previously altered her last name from Graff to Craft. One year later, in 1849, they had a daughter, Louise Craft Adams. John and Sarah settled on Portland Avenue, a broad thoroughfare that had once served as the turnpike connecting Portland to Louisville. John’s shop and residence at 615 Portland, between Eighth and Ninth streets, was beyond the Louisville Railroad Bridge across the river and at the very eastern edge of the city. By 1882, however, he...