“ Here in Kentucky …[the] past
has always felt close and I’ve always felt connected to it,
sprung from it, like it or not. Down the road from my house
is an old family graveyard. One of the graves there is for
a woman whose first name was America. Even though I live in
the middle of nowhere, sometimes it feels like I live in
the center of it all.”
Poet
Maurice Manning, Southeast Review, 2008.
Long before
caravans of diesel trucks crisscrossed the nation on the
interstate highway system. Long before the railroads pushed
freight across America from sea to shining sea. Before the
Chicago commodities exchange. Before Dow Jones became a
household name. Before any of that – there were the rivers
carved out by God.
The mighty Ohio forms near Pittsburgh and with its many
tributaries sweeps westward until it eventually empties
into the wide Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois, a few miles
from Paducah in far western Kentucky. In turn, the
Mississippi rushes southward with its co-mingled waters to
the port of New Orleans. Thus, fledgling America had a
natural superhighway that stretched almost 2000 miles from
the northeast corridor to the Gulf of Mexico.
And that made all the difference. Without the rivers to
move cargo from producers to markets in the
18th
and
19th
centuries,
America might have remained a small, skinny country
hunkered along the Atlantic seaboard. The rivers – and the
men who navigated them --are central to America’s story of
westward expansion, and their role in developing the young
nation’s abundant economy cannot be overstated.
Certainly, here in Kentucky – America’s first western
frontier -- the Ohio River and its tributaries defined who
we would become, determined where we would build our towns,
and enabled us to get our agricultural products to a world
market. The Ohio, of course, jigsaws Kentucky’s northern
boundary east to west, and lies, interestingly enough,
within Kentucky – not in the state of Ohio. But the state’s
smaller Kentucky River also has played a significant role
in American commerce.
The Kentucky River rambles 259 miles, commencing in the
mountains of eastern Kentucky, then cutting through the
lush bluegrass region of the state creating limestone
palisades that are the stuff of poetry, before leveling out
and flowing through flat fertile bottoms on its journey to
the sea. Forty miles of the lower Kentucky River pass
through my particular place on earth, Owen County, not long
before the river empties into the Ohio at Carrollton near
Louisville.
As early as 1787 – only twelve years after Daniel Boone
established Boonesborough in the western wilderness--
Kentucky agriculture products exceeded the demands of local
markets. Pork, flour and tobacco were going to waste in
storage. The market that was needed in those early days was
New Orleans which unfortunately was under the control of
Spain.
In 1789, when
negotiations with Spain finally opened the markets in New
Orleans to Americans, historian Dr. Thomas Clark says the
Kentucky River quickly became “lined with boats on their
way to New Orleans.” These were still powerless flatboats,
but thus began transportation of farm products on the
Kentucky.
In Owen County,
this early river traffic resulted in warehouses being built
at locations such as Gratz and Monterey, and these became
the natural points in later decades for steamboats to pick
up cargo to be carried to Louisville and Cincinnati and
points beyond. By mid-19th
century, cities
along the Ohio had become primary markets, but often the
steamboats hurried cargo right on to New Orleans which
could be reached in 12 days if all went well.
Owen Countians of all types engaged in this chain of
commerce. My own g-grandfather, Amos Noel, was a tobacco
pinhooker at Monterey, buying tobacco directly from farmers
in the barn and shipping it on to market by steamboat from
the Monterey warehouse and dock.
Others engaged with the river itself. Navigators straight
out of a Mark Twain novel, they knew the bowels of the
Kentucky River as intimately as a surgeon knows the human
body.
One of the most notable river men that Owen County claims
was Gratz resident, Noble Nash Hundley. Noble Nash – like
Mark Twain - was a steamboat pilot. He piloted a number of
boats in his lifetime, but was fondest of the time he spent
on the grand Falls
City II,
a familiar steamboat on the Kentucky, the Ohio, and the
Mississippi. His granddaughter, Owenton resident Sandra
Hundley Stafford, has a drawing hanging in her home that
pictures her grandfather standing by the
Falls
City II.
It was the premier boat on the Kentucky River at the turn
of the 20th
century. A large
boat, it could carry 90 hogsheads of tobacco in its hold
and 100 more hogsheads on its deck. It also transported all
kinds of livestock to market. Remarkably, it also had room
for passengers. Since it was the only way to go, the rich
and the poor, the famous and the infamous, rode the
Falls City
II together. An
overnight trip from Frankfort to Louisville cost a
passenger six to seven dollars including meals, and special
holiday excursions featured dancing on the deck.
Often the Falls
City II carried
traveling shows that performed at small river towns like
Monterey and Gratz.
As might be expected of a steamboat pilot, Noble Nash
Hundley was a handsome man, straight out of central
casting. (Picture a weathered Clark Gable.) He was born in
1863 in Port Royal, the son of Evan Hundley and Elizabeth
Wilson Hundley. He married Laura Douthitt, 24 Feb., 1891,
in Henry County, and if family lore can be believed, he
pampered her like a princess. According to her
granddaughter, the pretty Laura would dress in her corsets
and finery every day and then sit fanning on her porch
watching for Noble Nash’s return on the river.
Noble Nash’s sister, Pearl Hawkins, also watched for him.
She lived near the Kentucky River in Henry County, and
often he would stop and spend a night at her house. To let
her know he was coming he’d send up a special signal with
the steamboat’s whistle.
The family tells other stories about Noble Nash. The one I
like best occurred in the winter of 1917-18 when the rivers
froze over solid leaving him stranded in Carrollton, Ky.
Determined to get home to Laura and the children, he bought
a pair of ice skates and skated 25 miles on the frozen
Kentucky to reach his hearth at Gratz.
In his history of the river, William Ellis tells this story
in which Hundley is an unnamed but certain player. The
steamboat Rescue
beat
the The Falls
City II through the lock
at Monterey. Not to be outdone in the competition for
freight revenue, the wily Falls City
II “dispatched its
deck hands overland to tobacco warehouses at Gratz. When
the Rescue
arrived in Gratz
the Falls
City’s
workmen had
commandeered the town and were already emptying the tobacco
warehouse in anticipation of their boat’s arrival.”
In time, of course, the steamboats gave way to the
railroads which could move freight faster and cheaper and
to more places. The dashing river men like Noble Nash
Hundley faded into folklore and legend.
But the rivers that spawned them endure. The rivers remain,
still, at the center of it all.