On a late-summer’s day, with 200 or so passengers aboard the Belle of Louisville for a two-hour cruise, 48-year-old captain Mark Doty steps out of the pilothouse and onto a steel landing bridge where he can see fore and aft along the starboard side of the 200-foot boat. Doty calls commands via radio intercom to the deckhands, who let loose the thick rope cables that bind the Belle to her moorings on the concrete wharf at the foot of Fourth Street downtown. They don’t just unhitch and toss the lines on deck. They run the lines around the “capstan” — a steam-powered roller winch mounted into the front deck’s floor. Using steam power, the deckhands balance the pull of the capstan winch against the power of the paddlewheel, easing the Belle away from the wharf and into the current of the river. So smooth you hardly know the Belle is underway.
Until, that is, the mighty steam whistle bellows forth a deep-throated shh-WOOOOO! that echoes off the concrete skyscrapers and across the nearly mile-wide Ohio River.
Steamboat comin’.
Pilot Drew Cederholm, 33, slowly guides the Belle away from shore. A barge slips quietly by, and Cederholm, by telegraph, dials a new speed command to the engine room below. He deftly moves a long, floor-mounted lever a bit to the right, sending the pilot wheel clockwise. “Power steering,” Cederholm says.
“All by steam,” adds Doty, now seated on an elevated “lazy bench” behind the pilot. “Everything works by steam power, including the electricity.”
The Belle picks up speed and Cederholm swings into the path just left by the barge, navigating between two high concrete spans of the George Rogers Clark Memorial Bridge. Cederholm points to a small green buoy in the river. “See how the current shows, coming off that buoy? You watch for things in the river, to see how the current is moving,” he says. Sure enough, a tiny wake angles off the buoy, rather than straight downriver. The big sliding glass windows of the pilothouse are open on both sides. A breeze comes through gently. Wafting. Not too much. Not too little. This is the way to travel. A fascinating world on the river as Mark Twain described in Life on the Mississippi.
On the day she was launched as the Idlewild in October 1914, the boat benefited from a century of steamboat-building evolution. That starts with the Belle’s steel hull. The original steamboats all had wooden hulls that rocky reefs could rupture or sunken tree trunks could puncture. This sounds hard to believe, but the life expectancy of steamboats in the 19th century was three to five years. If they didn’t rip up from the bottom, the boilers would blow them up (usually not when passengers were aboard, but sometimes). Steamboats were so lucrative that when one cracked up, they’d just build another — and another.
Three stories below the pilot house, assistant engineer Steve Mattingly, 56, stands amid a labyrinth of pipes and valves and pressure gauges. He explains that many of the pipes and valves work to maintain ideal steam pressure, with others designed specifically for safety — to “let off steam” in order to avoid sudden pressure buildups. “It’s like a fine-tuned internal-combustion engine in cars, except all the engine parts are outside instead of inside,” Mattingly says.
The steam power begins up front in the firebox, where furnaces heat three big boilers of water. Originally, men shoveled coal into the furnace. But today it’s fueled more efficiently (and cleanly) by burning diesel. The water in the boilers, conveniently, is plain-old free river water. The entire system is like a kettle of water heating on a stove. Steam coming off the boilers travels aft through steam pipes and the maze of side pipes and cut-off valves, to the steam engine in the rear. The engine powers two Pitman arms, one on each side of the boat — one pushing while the other pulls — to turn the Belle’s mightly oak-paddled wheel.
“It’s propulsion,” Mattingly says. “The power of steam to push the boat. It’s what made steamboating in America.”
Before the invention of the steamboat in 1811, inland farmers and industries floated their products — say, barrels of Kentucky whiskey — down the Ohio and Mississippi to seaports like New Orleans. But wind and sails couldn’t get the boats back upriver against fast-moving currents and winding passages. “Steamboats changed all that,” Mattingly says, “because they had steam to power a paddlewheel, to propel the boats back upsteam.”
Propulsion!
From Oct. 14 to 19 the Belle of Louisville will take center stage in a Centennial Festival of Riverboats in Louisville. The event will include five steamboats, with days of boat rides and races and evenings of fireworks and music at Waterfront Park.
The event hits the Belle’s 100th birthday right on the mark. The Idlewild, as the Belle was originally named, slipped into the river for duty at the James Rees and Sons shipbuilding yard in Pittsburgh on Oct. 19, 1914. The Idlewild wasn’t built with luxurious staterooms or adorned with frilly “gingerbread” details. “She was built to haul,” Doty says. “People, goats, pigs — you name it. She began in the packet business on the Mississippi River.”
After World War II, Doty says, the Idlewild was sold and renamed the Avalon, which operated out of Cincinnati and Louisville. “Just tramped the river,” Doty says, using a word that means cruising for day excursions. The boat’s calliope would announce the steamboat’s arrival. Kind of like the circus coming to town. Today, an excursion on the Belle begins in much the same way, with Martha Gibbs playing lively songs on the steam-powered calliope as passengers board. With just 32 brass keys, the thing isn’t easy to play.
In 1962, the Avalon went up for sale. Steamboating fans, including Louisville oilman C.W. Stoll, advised Jefferson County Judge/Executive Marlow Cook that the boat was sound and could be bought for cheap and become a tourist attraction. Cook bit, and bid, taking home the Avalon for $34,000. After some refurbishing, the boat took a new name: Belle of Louisville.
“One citizen complained to Mayor Charlie Farnsley that the cost was too high,” says Belle CEO Linda Harris. “Mayor Farnsley wrote down on a piece of paper the cost of the boat, divided that by the number of residents, and came up with a individual cost of seven cents per resident. Then, he fished into his pocket and gave the disgruntled taxpayer back his seven cents.”
Harris says the Belle’s future is as important as its past.
“We have an ongoing ‘legacy’ program to train future officers of the Belle,” Harris says.
“Those are licensed maritime positions, with extensive training required. The Belle is in excellent condition, and if she lives another 100 years there will be young people coming along who can operate her.”
Images courtesy of Aaron Kingsbury.
This article appears in the October issue of Louisville Magazine. To subscribe to Louisville Magazine, click here.
