Little yellow steamboat at Nashville in the 70s

Could you possibly be referring to the BELLE CAROL? She was a former towboat with a chain driven sternwheel and was also named KANAWHA, having operated as an excursion boat for a few years at Vicksburg. I'm not sure of her whereabouts now or even if she still exists.

Here's the BELLE CAROL. The only thing yellow about her in this postcard seems to be her crowns. But maybe she had a different color scheme at one time, or it's not the right boat.

Looks real pretty to me : )

Anyone know where she is now? Is she for sale

Tom,
The BELLE CAROL was rebuilt in 1987 as a live-aboard, and was for sale as of March 2005. Don't know if it sold or not. It was in Florida. I refer you to this thread on the old message board:
http://www.steamboats.org/talkshop&msg_num=1972 0">Old BELLE CAROL Thread

Somewhere I have some pics of Capt. Lou Plumlee on the BC when it first came out in Nashville in the early '70's. Always jovial and smiling, Cap'n Lou was a fine gentleman and always the congenial host aboard the Music City sternwheeler. Of course we also remember the boat when she was alongside the SPRAGUE as the KANAWHA and the tragic story of Dr. Johnson's drowning.

No, I saw the Belle Carol often while in Nashville. The local fleet in Nashville was referred to as the Belle Carol Riverboat Co. or somthing close, as I recall. The yellow boat was dormant for a couple of years, just tied up at the piling. She was definitely butter yellow with white trim. An interesting color for a steamboat. I think she may have belonged to the Belle Carol Riverboat Co. and they may have sold her. There was a wheel on the bank at the local boat ramp above Nashville that was off of one of their old boats. You have me interested in more about the history of the Belle Carol now!

Ed

I am not 100% sure, but I BELIEVE the BELLE CAROL that y'all are referring to was dismantled some years back. There may be some confusion here, as there was also a boat in Memphis named BELLE CAROL, owned by the Memphis Queen Line. The BELLE CAROL OF THE CUMBERLAND (which I think might have been the Nashville boat's official name) was owned at Nashville by Dr. Hugh Claughton, a Nashville dentist. He also had a fake sternwheeler named something-ANN ( the name escapes me at the moment). Both that boat and the BELLE CAROL were sold off when the Claughtons had the MUSIC CITY QUEEN built in the late 1980's. They were later bought out by Opryland and got out of the excursion boat biz, at least in Nashville.

The BELLE CAROL at Memphis MAY be the one that was converted to a live-aboard in Florida. She was also a sternwheeler, hull built at Dubuque and everything else completed by Capt. Tom Meanley at Memphis. It was a nice little home-made boat, a true sternwheeler with hand steering and no generator, allowed 65 pax., but was underpowered for the Mississippi at Memphis. She was sold to some folks on the Miss. Gulf Coast in the early 90's, and seems to have disappeared. Don't know if this is the BELLE CAROL listed for sale or not!

We sure strayed far from the "little yellow boat" at Nashville, didn't we?!?

Bob: Thanks for further elucidation! The link that Steve Huffman provided to a thread on this topic from the old message board provides a lot of good details as well, including the posting from Travis that the old BELLE CAROL (built at Howard's as the towboat KANAWHA in 1924) was dismantled. I saw her several times but never was aboard. I have some slides and photos of her alongside the SPRAGUE at Vicksburg and she looks extremely diminutive by comparison! The other boat at Nashville was the CAPTAIN ANN. When I first rode the MEMPHIS QUEEN II in the summer of 1969, I remember the small BELLE CAROL, MEMPHIS SHOWBOAT and a tiny single deck sternwheeler named the CAPTAIN TOM at the Memphis Queen landing. Was the CAPTAIN TOM built by Capt. Jake Meanley?

Yes, but the straying is what makes this fun, isn't it. Maybe it was the the Belle Carol that I was seeing, as the Gen. Jackson had just come out at Opryland a bit before that time. Seeing her from that high interstate bridge may have played some tricks on the color. A lot of great information has come from this thread. If anyone has any pictures of the Kanawha that would be interesting to see.

Ed

Keith, I only saw the CAPTAIN TOM once, and I remember her as being a little single-screw towboat, VERY small. The BELLE CAROL at Memphis was a single deck boat, too (a sternwheeler). Jake had a tugboat that had belonged to Cenac, that he named TOM MEANLEY, and that was used variously as a tug for barge shifting work in the Memphis harbor, as a towboat to push the excursion barge MEMPHIS SHOWBOAT, via romote control (and grossly underpowered for THAT), and as a place to live for any of Jake's friends who found themselves without a place to bunk. We are getting off on anopther tangent, here, as Jake Meanley was a character! His father, Capt. Tom Meanley, was a good businessman and boatman, but the word cheap does not begin to describe how Capt. Tom guarded his money. This is why he built his own boats. With the MEMPHIS SHOWBOAT and BELLE CAROL, he had Denny Trone build the hulls for him and completed everything else himslelf, knowledge gained from reading books at the library and trial and error. A pretty amazing guy. He designed and built the MEMPHIS QUEEN III from the keel up with help from a couple of other people, and did the same with the ISLAND QUEEN. Did this in his back yard, and had house movers move the boats to the riverbank on President's Island to wait for high water to get them launched. An interesting man with an eccentric family.

Bob: I'll have to dig out the old scrapbook that has pictures from that 1969 trip, but it does seem that the CAPT. TOM had a fake sternwheel. She was a tiny homemade looking boat and was alongside the MEMPHIS QUEEN wharfboat. My most vivid recollections of riding the MEMPHIS QUEEN II in June of 1969 (when I was barely 15 years old) are of being very impressed with how WIDE the Mississippi River is at Memphis -- and of the "jolt" we experienced when we returned to the landing and Capt. Jake Meanley (as a young pilot) "crashed" into the wharfboat with too much headway! My grandmother, who had a fear of water, was NOT amused! When Capt. Jake visited the Howard Steamboat Museum about 10 years ago, I told him about that cruise but he didn't seem to find it amusing either!

Was that the one Jim and I looked at for perhaps putting on Caddo Lake? Seems it was used down around New Orleans as a casino boat shuttle or some such. Nice little boat and now I wish we had it as a dinner boat here on Caddo. Amost all of our local reataurants have closed, burned down, or have declined in quality. Only yellow-ish boats I know of were or are owned by the Corps of Engineers and John Beatty.

You weren't thinking of the River Rose, were you Lexie? I think she was from Shreveport but sat around in NOLA a long time looking for an owner....

Lex, that was the BELLE CAROL y'all looked at. It was for sale at that time, but not officially so. Yes, that's one of those "coulda, woulda, shoulda" deals that looks great in hindsight! I always liked that little BELLE CAROL at Memphis. When they sold it (after I no longer worked for the Meanleys) no one there was really sure WHERE it had gone to. Has not been in the Inland River Record for some time, either. I am no longer an insider at that establishment, and doubt whether any of the current regime there knows anything anyway. Cold trail.

Here is a picture of the BELLE CAROL Judy just sent. Thanks Judy!

Franz

Judy has sent some pictures regarding the Memphis Queens- Her comments: "Here are the MEMPHIS QUEEN II, with its weird double pilothouses, and the MEMPHIS QUEEN III, which Meanley built in his backyard and transported to the river."

Thanks Judy!

Franz

Thanks, Franz & Judy. The "weird" double pilothouse came about in the 1960's. Capt. Tom, as I mentioned, was rather frugal. He built the MEMPHIS SHOWBOAT as a passenger barge to get pax away from noise and vibration, a really rather ingenious plan. He used the MEMPHIS QUEEN II to push the SHOWBOAT. As originally configured, the pilothouse on the MQ was not tall enough to see over the SHOWBOAT, so he just stuck another one on top. You could still steer from the lower pilothouse when I worked for them, though there were no throttles there.

I had also mentioned that Jake had a tugboat named TOM MEANLEY, about 350 total horsepower. This was a model bow tug that had ancient Caterpillar engines in it. They used this tug to push the SHOWBOAT when the MEMPHIS QUEEN had a trip scheduled at the same time as a SHOWBOAT trip, and they had a remote control set-up to the tug from a pilothouse on the SHOWBOAT. You had to connect hydraulic and air hoses between the tug and the SHOWBOAT. It was a very ingenious system, but the tug was grossly underpowered for the job, and to make matters worse, Jake never wanted to run the engines over about half, as he was afraid they'd tear up. How the Coast Guard ever approved that plan I will never know.