Topic starter
08/11/2009 4:18 am
Last week the wonderful curator of the Howard Museum, Yvonne Knight, had a collection of 100 slides which she wanted scanned into the computer. Among the slides were two pictures of the SUNSHINE. It is one of her favorite boats and she thinks "it's lovely." In the Howard collection is an excellent picture of the SUNSHINE sitting just off shore at Howards. I like pictures like this one because of all the activity that is going on. I wonder what the occasion was, my guess would be a launching; but what boat or what year.
I hope you enjoy looking at these pictures as much as I do.
1. This is the complete picture. Look at all the people not only on the SUNSHINE, but also on the bank.
2. What boat is this and why has the stern bulkhead been cut off? Think OSHA would allow this today...notice the little girl looking over the stern.
3. I enlarged this for Shipyard Sam, he loves rowing boats. Think the Rabbit Hash Shipyard could duplicate this beautiful hull? Notice the girl on the bank with the straw hat and curled pig tails...the height of fashion at the turn of the 20th century.
08/11/2009 10:39 am
The Sunshine had an interesting history. It was built in 1888 and did ferry and excursion service between Louisville, Jeffersonville, Fern Grove Resort, and White City and Fontaine Ferry amusement parks. She ranged the Ohio from Brandenburg-Mauckport to Carrollton.
In 1907 Captain William McNally bought her for use in the Pittsburgh area. The Sunshine was too wide for the Monongahela locks, so Captain McNally cut a couple of feet off the sides of the boat. The paddlewheel shafts had to be cut off, too, but no Pittsburgh machinist would do it. McNally set up turning tools on the boat and used her engines to turn new journals inboard of the old ones. The shafts were then cut off, but the stub ends stuck through holes in the paddlewheel housings. From that time on ugly black streaks of grease dripped down the sides.
Captain McNally died in 1920. The boat was bought by John W. Hubbard, who changed the name to Princess, and ran her at Cincinnati and Louisville as the "colored" boat. (Separate, but equal, was the law in Kentucky at that time.)
One night in January, 1928, the Bates Family was visiting friends in Crescent Hill, a neighborhood in Louisville. The hullabaloo of fire engines and whistles was heard and a huge red glow colored the clouds, so we jumped into a Model T Ford and bounced over the railroad tracks to the foot of Wenzel Street just in time to watch the Princess slowly drift through the Big Four Bridge, aflame from end to end. A couple of men were running around on the main deck.
Somehow they got a line ashore at the foot of Clay Street and landed the boat. Despite the efforts of the Louisville Fire Department she burned to the waterline.
Years later I read the newspaper account of the fire and learned the two men were from the Louisville Lifeboat Station. Neither was hurt.
08/11/2009 3:30 pm
Great postings
Thanks Jim for the great pictures and thanks Alan for the great narrative of your personal experience with the SUNSHINE.
It does look like it could be a launching, perhaps of the boat coming back toward the photographer? But if so, was it normal to have so many townsfolk at a launching, all dressed up to boot? And all those little boats in the area? Could it possibly have been a mass baptism? I don't see any people in the water, and I don't know that such an event would be done at a shipyard, but I'm trying to think why so many people would be gathered there. It wouldn't have been the launching of the SUNSHINE itself, would it?
Alan, did your family chase fire engines a lot? My dad and I did, but one call I missed was to the DQ during her 1954 layup on the RI levee. I think that happened while I was in school and Dad was at work.