Railways in Alabama were still practically unknown, and steamboat travel was exceedingly popular. On the best and finest steamers the entertainment could scarcely be excelled. The staterooms were often elegant, and always comfortable, and the tables were banquet boards. The best country produce was gathered at the landings, and the table fare was one of the boasts of the steamers. The most sumptuous carpets were on the floors of the passenger saloons, while superb furniture was alike pleasing to the eye and comfortable in practical use. The boats were constructed with three decks, known, respectively, as the lower, the middle or passenger, and the upper or hurricane deck.
During the cotton season, which extended from September to March, or about one-half the year, the boats would descend the rivers loaded each trip with hundreds of bales of cotton, and returning, would be laden with merchandise, while in both directions, there was usually a throng of passengers. On some of the most elegant steamers were calliopes, the music of which would resound at night over many miles of territory pierced by the rivers. Nothing known to entertainment or comfort was omitted on a first-class steamer in the forties and fifties.
Many of the landings on the rivers were located on high bluffs through which a flight of steps would lead from the summit to the water’s edge, the length of which flight would sometimes exceed several hundred feet. Alongside the uncovered stairway, was a tram for a wide car, which was nothing more than a platform on wheels, which wheels ran on two beams of wood, the surface of which was sheeted with iron. The car was operated by means of a pulley on the summit, which, in turn, was operated by a mule or horse moving in a circular enclosure. The freight from the steamer was strung along the bank below, to be cared for by the warehouse above. When cotton was to be shipped from the top of the bluff, a number of deck hands would go to the top of the steps, and each bale was slid down the tramway to the boat. The bale would be started endwise and descend with whizzing swiftness, strike the lower deck, be seized by the hands below, and put in place.
Great were the days of the reign of the steamboat! While slow, compared with later methods of travel, steamboat passage was the acme of comfort and enjoyment. The social pleasure afforded was unsurpassed. While it would require several days to go two or three hundred miles by boat, the element of time was not so much a consideration in those leisurely days as it is now, and the regret was often that the time of the passage was not longer. During the busy season the schedule of the boats was most irregular, and not infrequently passengers would wait the arrival of the boat for twenty-four hours, and sometimes even longer.
It was interesting, the contention and competition among the rival boats for freight and passenger traffic. In order to be able to advertise the popularity of a given steamer, the subordinate officers and others of the crew, would solicit passengers at the hotels of the terminal cities, and would not only offer free passage, sometimes, but actually offer a consideration of a small sum of money, in addition, to such as would make choice of that steamer in preference to another.
The war greatly crippled boating on the rivers, and with the rally and rehabilitation of the South from the effects of the war, the railway came on anon, and the steamers largely disappeared from our rivers.
HARRY, THE MARTYR JANITOR
Howard College, then at Marion, was burned on the night of October 15, 1854.