Historical Notes: Chapter Nine

The Ohio River and Its Steamboats

In the late nineteenth century, the Ohio River was one of the great commercial and passenger corridors of America. The peak of passenger steamboat travel fell between 1870 and 1900 — the Victorian era — when packet boats ran scheduled routes connecting Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Cincinnati, Louisville, and the towns in between, including Catlettsburg, Kentucky. These packets were self-contained worlds: businessmen traveled to Cincinnati to buy stock for their stores, their wives came along for the trip, and young people counted it an event to see four hundred miles of the Ohio from the deck of a steamboat. There was dancing at night and card playing in the saloons. The boats arranged their schedules to connect with the railroads, allowing a traveler to reach most cities in the Ohio and Mississippi basins with relative ease.

Catlettsburg itself, situated at the mouth of the Big Sandy River where it meets the Ohio, was home to more than one hundred steamboats over the years. When the water on the Big Sandy ran too low for industrial steamboats, Catlettsburg residents worked the Ohio River trade. By the 1880s, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad was beginning to change everything — a bridge connecting Catlettsburg with Kenova, West Virginia opened in 1885 — and railroads gradually replaced the river packets as the primary means of travel. By the early twentieth century, little was left of the great steamboat era but memories.

"Yes, Virginia": A Question for the Ages

In the summer of 1897 — the same year Mack McQuary set out from Mountain Grove on his quest — an eight-year-old girl named Virginia O'Hanlon wrote a letter to the New York Sun. Her friends had told her there was no Santa Claus, and her father, a police surgeon named Dr. Philip O'Hanlon, suggested she write to the paper, assuring her that "if you see it in The Sun, it's so."

The letter landed on the desk of Francis Pharcellus Church, a fifty-eight-year-old veteran journalist and former Civil War correspondent who reportedly "bristled and pooh-poohed" when asked to respond to a child's question. Nevertheless, under deadline, he produced a 417-word reply that has become the most reprinted newspaper editorial in the English language, translated into some twenty languages and republished every Christmas season for over a century.

Church's answer appeared in The Sun on September 21, 1897: "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist." Church remained anonymous as the author until his death in 1906. Virginia O'Hanlon went on to earn a doctorate in education from Fordham University and spent forty-seven years as a New York City schoolteacher and principal. She continued to receive mail about her letter until her death in 1971 at age eighty-one.

Catlettsburg, Kentucky: Gateway of the Big Sandy

When Mack passed through Catlettsburg — situated at the confluence of the Ohio and Big Sandy rivers at the Kentucky-West Virginia border — he was passing through a town that had recently become, improbably, the largest hardwood timber market in the world. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and lasting until the early 1920s, the timber boom transformed Catlettsburg from a modest river town into a significant commercial center. Most of the old-growth timber for miles around was felled during this period; very few trees of desirable breeds were left standing once the boom ran its course.

The town's origins were older. Alexander Catlett arrived in 1798, and his son Horatio opened a post office in 1810 — the first official use of the name Catlettsburg, previously known as Mouth of Sandy. During the Civil War, Catlettsburg stood firmly with the Union, and men from the town served under Colonel James A. Garfield — later the twentieth president — in efforts to keep Confederate forces out of eastern Kentucky.

By the time Mack passed through in the late 1890s, the railroad had arrived: the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad bridge connecting Catlettsburg with Kenova, West Virginia had opened in 1885, and Collis P. Huntington's line to Cincinnati was completed in 1888. The town that had lived by the river was learning to live by the rails.