With the coming of the September and October rains, the Tombigbee’s summer time shallow water gives way to rising water of fall and thoughts in Columbus and Aberdeen long ago turned to the arrival of steamboats.
From 1823 to 1919, large steamboats carried cotton from the upper Tombigbee to Mobile and returned loaded with goods for local merchants. These boats could carry from 50 to 100 passengers in an elegant style and were called “floating palaces.”
One of the most famous of these “floating palaces” was the steamer Cuba, a 286-ton sidewheeler with a capacity of 1,700 bales of cotton that would have averaged 500 pounds each. She was the fastest steamboat on the Tombigbee/Alabama/Mobile River System and it was said that it ran “like a scared dog.” She was built in 1850 for the Columbus-Mobile trade, but due to low water on the upper Tombigbee in the fall of 1850, she ran in November 1850 as a Vicksburg-New Orleans packet boat.
For a large steamer to travel up the Tombigbee to Columbus, at least six feet on the old Columbus gauge was required and 12 feet to continue to Aberdeen. A packet boat was a steamboat that carried both cargo and passengers on regular schedule. Today’s pool level of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway at Columbus actually corresponds with about six feet on the old gauge.
In November 1850, the Cuba was traveling from Louisville, Kentucky, to Mobile to become a packet boat in the Columbus trade. She arrived in New Orleans on Nov. 8 and received the praise of the press there for her lines, accommodations and speed. The Daily Crescent reported: “She is a perfect model of steamboat architecture, and it is believed combines the ability to carry, with great speed, in a higher degree, than any boat of her class now afloat. … Her state-rooms are large and commodious, and all of them, in both cabins, are supplied with the very best quality of spring mattresses. In short, her whole finish is in the most exquisite good taste, and her accommodations for passengers unsurpassed. She was built for the Columbus and Mobile trade, but the Tombigbee being too low at present to admit her, she is to take the place of the Emperor in the Vicksburg trade tor the present. The Emperor, we may add, goes back into her old trade in the Alabama River.”
After rains began in the Tombigbee Valley, the Cuba proceeded to Mobile and became the Saturday packet boat for Columbus. Her captain was the colorful and popular Robert Otis. Steamers would run on the upper Tombigbee, called the Bigbee or Little Bigbee, during winter high water and then run on the Alabama River in the low water of summer.
During the 1850-51 season the Cuba made 16 round trips between Columbus and Mobile. In April 1851, Henry Bayliss and his wife traveled from Columbus to Mobile on the Cuba. They left Columbus at 12:30 a.m. on April 2 and arrived in Mobile the next day at 9 p.m. In 1852, she became the Monday Mobile packet for Columbus, leaving Mobile at 5 p.m. on Mondays, arriving in Columbus on Wednesday evening and then returning to Mobile.
The Tombigbee’s low water of late spring and summer found the Cuba on the Alabama River as a Mobile to Montgomery packet boat. There her competitor in trade and speed was the Wm. Jones Jr., a steamer built in Mobile in 1853. In a famous circa 1854 race with the Jones from Mobile to Montgomery, the Cuba was the victor by three hours. In another race against six other steamers, the Cuba allowed them a head start from Mobile, and when all six were straightened out headed up river “the throttle of the Cuba was pulled open and she swept through the ranks as though they were moored to the wharf.”
The Mobile steamboats of the 1850s really were floating places and a boat’s reputation was based on a combination of its captain, cook, bartender and speed. During its short life of 1850 to 1856, the Cuba was one of the most popular of the Mobile steamers.
How fancy were these steamboats? In 1858, a writer for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine traveled from Montgomery to Mobile on the steamer Henry J. King and wrote: “No public conveyance in the world can compare either in substantial comfort or luxurious elegance with those of our Southwestern waters. The weary may repose on spring mattresses or cut velvet sofas; the hungry are fed with the richest viands, served with a quiet elegance equaled but in first-class restaurants of Paris.”
The Cuba met her end near Davis Landing on the Alabama River in 1856. Her loss is part of the convoluted story of an “old, forked oak log, with a large round knot at the fork.” In the early 1850s, the steamer Sam Dale was damaged after hitting the log then the steamer Sunny South hit it and sank, followed by the steamers Aberdeen and Empire striking it and sinking. The current of the river changed the position of the wreck of the Empire and on March 20, 1856, the Cuba struck that wreck, ripping a hole in her bottom and she rapidly sank resulting in four passengers and two crewmen drowning. In May the Montgomery Mail commented on the old log and all the wrecks: “It is estimated that this old log has cost the country a number of precious lives and about $150,000 in property destroyed and damaged. It seems to us it is decidedly in the interest of some people to remove that “old forked oak log.”
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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