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When warm weather arrives, it’s time for people to head to the river. The Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway provides a wide range of recreational boating.
As people enjoy the river, they often begin to think about long ago and the large steamboats that once traveled from Columbus and Aberdeen to Mobile. So, this time of the year I am often asked just how big those steamboats were and what they really looked like.
Except for a few small steamboats in the lumber industry, large steamboats carrying not only cargo but also passengers had vanished from the upper Tombigbee by the early 1920s. The two decades prior to the Civil War was the golden age of the Tombigbee steamboats. The boats of that era included many large boats referred to as “floating palaces.”
Steamers such as the 200-foot long Eliza Battle would run as packet boats between Aberdeen, Columbus and Mobile. A packet boat was a steamer that ran on a regular schedule and carried both cargo and passengers. The Eliza Battle during the winter of 1857-1858 ran weekly between Columbus and Mobile carrying around 60 passengers and at times more than 2,000 cotton bales weighing about 500 pounds each.
Before the completion of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad in the late 1850s, the Mobile, Tombigbee, Warrior and Alabama rivers were the interstate highways of Alabama and northeast Mississippi. The arrival of the railroad in the 1850s and then the Civil War ended the heyday of Tombigbee steamboats and mostly smaller and less elegant boats traveled the river.
The railroads reduced the amount of steamboat traffic but did not kill it. Some railroads, such as the Central Railroad and Banking Company of Georgia, even owned steamboats that carried cotton from Columbus to its railhead at Demopolis. From there cotton would be shipped to Savannah, Georgia, rather than Mobile. It was the use of motor vehicles and the construction of all weather roads that killed the Upper Tombigbee steamboat traffic. The last reported steamboat of any size arrived at Columbus in 1915.
These are postcard images of some of the Steamboats that came to Columbus in the early 1900s.
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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