The Public Interest

Photo: Margaret Fenton of the Chattanooga Times Free Press

The Delta Queen, the oldest river steamboat in working order arrives in Chattanooga today to take up permanent residence as a hotel along the north shore of the Tennessee River. The ship was decommissioned because of its wooden bottom. (You can see its “specs” here, at its own website). It is moving to Chattanooga from its prior home of New Orleans because of fears of vandalism.

The steamboat was one of the first self-propelled vehicles, & helped to usher in the Industrial Age back in the 1700s; you can read the history of its invention & impact here.

It’s evidently not hard to make one yourself; read about how you can create a lil’ steamboat for your bathtub here.

You can read more about the efforts to preserve the Delta Queen as an endangered historic landmark here, which seems to be the steamboat chatter hub on the internet, as least as far as I could find.

Photographer/blogger Sue Henry has some great photos & accounts from the shore on the DQ’s passage through Kentucky on the way here.

As a biographical aside, I was born & raised in St. Joseph, Missouri, itself a riverboat hub for a time. You can read how that changed in the 19th century here, in this book made available online via Google.

& finally, did you know Johnny Cash wrote a song about riverboat traffic on the Tennessee River?

The above clip is from an episode of his television show from June 21st, 1969. He plays “the Whirl & the Suck” (which appears on his 1968 Americana album “From Sea to Shining Sea,” at about 2:30 in the clip, which also - interestingly - features footage (presumably) of the Tennessee near Chattanooga.

& I’d be remiss here if I didn’t quote the best account of steamboat life in the 19th century from Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi:”:

“When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.”

If you have any thoughts about the Delta Queen, steamboats, or river traffic past & present in the Chattanooga area, feel free to weigh in in the comments section.

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