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33. Living with the River
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325 33 Living with the River Maysville’s riverfront continues to be its most dynamic landscape. The historic river landing area that extended from the mouth of Limestone Creek west to Wall Street has been transformed by the razing of buildings, the installation of railroad tracks, and, most recently, the wholesale removal of much of Front Street. The space is now filled by a concrete flood wall that defends a new street, McDonald Parkway, a motel, and associated parking lots and buildings. The riverfront transformation is so comprehensive that only through historic maps, photographs, and personal accounts from the period can one attempt to reconstruct the scene here during the nineteenth century’s first five decades. Initially, flatboats and keelboats pulled into Limestone Creek or tied up at the adjacent banks to load and unload cargo. The steamboat Enterprise, built at Brownsville on the lower Monongahela south of Pittsburgh, demonstrated successfully in 1815 that Ohio Valley steamboats could readily move freight upstream, thereby rendering flatboats and keelboats anachronistic, if not primitive. Thereafter, steamboat construction at river ports such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville proceeded rapidly. In 1820 sixty-nine steamboats with a collective capacity of 13,890 tons operated on the Ohio River. By 1855, 727 boats with a capacity of 170,000 tons plied the river.1 At riverfront landings steamboats shouldered out the nonpowered craft. To enhance the rather confined Maysville landing area for steam-powered craft, engineers constructed a wharf boat and anchored it a short distance offshore at the foot of Market Street, where it was connected by a dock to the bank. The wharf boat was of sufficient length to tie up one large steamboat or two intermediate-size vessels. Port improvements proceeded apace, but nagging navigational problems limited largescale development of river-borne commerce. The prevailing annual climatic cycle of wet winters and dry, hot summers limited the primary shipping season to the weeks of maximum river flow, usually late winter until midsummer. Low river flow from midsummer through late fall, the driest months, limited steamboat travel to the river channel’s deepest section, or what hydrologists term the thalweg. In many years the river’s flow was so low that water traffic stopped for weeks at a time. In 1838, for example, low water confined riverboats to their harbors from July to November.2 Even when the river rose to a level 326 The Maysville Road: A Landscape Biography sufficient to permit boat travel, navigation required great care to avoid shallow bars, rocky ledges such as the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville, or collision with the thousands of sunken or floating snags that studded the channel like dragon’s teeth. A snag was a large tree growing on a bank that the river undermined and washed out into the channel . Such trees often embedded themselves in the river-bottom silts. A waterlogged trunk and branches presented a bristling threat, like a riverine abatis, that grasped at vulnerable ship hulls. Between 1825 and 1829 riverboats wrecked on Ohio River snags lost cargos valued at more than $1.3 million.3 The Allegheny and Monongahela rivers join at Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle, forming the Ohio, which flows southwest 981 miles to its junction with the Mississippi near Cairo, Illinois. The Ohio drains a 204,000-square-mile watershed that extends from western New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia south and west to include most of West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and a tier of counties in eastern Illinois. The main river and its hundreds of tributaries form a dendritic watershed drainage pattern; only about 5 percent of the river’s flow comes from runoff that moves directly into the main channel. Tributary characteristics therefore strongly influence the speed and volume of runoff into the main channel.4 By the eighteenth century’s latter decades, Ohio River watershed resources were already known, at least in rough outline: hardwood forest in seemingly unending expanses, high-quality iron ore deposits, extensive bituminous coal measures, salt-producing brine springs, fertile soils and accessible topography, and a temperate climate.5 All this provided an impetus for alacritous settlement and development, rapid growth of industry and manufacturing, and a diverse and productive agriculture. The lands on the Ohio’s north side became the cradle of the Corn Belt. To the south, in West Virginia and Kentucky, lay the central Appalachian coalfield and the rich farmlands of Kentucky’s Bluegrass and Pennyroyal regions.6 Today twenty navigational dams control...