The Dominion Post
May 21, 2001
By Norman Julian
"... I watch and marvel at the way your seasonal moods may vary day by day, with generations sleeping on the hill while you keep flowing, time defying still. ..." -- Oscar Dubois
My friend Donald Strimbeck knows the Monongahela River more than most.
I call the retired chemical engineer affectionately "a river rat" because he lives along the river at Granville and spends much of his leisure time in clement weather ploughing in his river craft, "The Flatulent Tosspot."
So when Don sent on a copy of Arthur Parker's book "The Monongahela," I figured to pay attention.
It was published in 1999 by the Pennsylvania State University Press (www.psu.edu/psupress), but it profiles a stream that is timeless.
"American rivers captured people's imaginations long before the days of Mark Twain," writes Parker, past executive vice president of the Waterways Association of Pittsburgh.
"Nature's original highways, they have flowed through the history of our country, spawning settlements along their banks and tying together the social and economic bonds on which we have built a nation."
He writes of "the many lives" of the Mon. It was "a goal for immigrants looking for a new and better way of life, a place to settle or a jumping-off point for settlers and pioneers, and the home of early trading centers."
Most of us over 50 can remember when the river, once called The Rhine of North America, was spotted by moveable "trains" of coal barges almost any time you looked at it along its stretches in West Virginia from Fairmont north.
That river traffic intensified as you moved north.
Morgantown's Oscar DuBois, called the poet laureate of Mason-Dixonland, was profiled in this newspaper more than once.
He died at age 109 in 1989. He recalled taking a boat at 3 p.m. one day in Pittsburgh in 1901 and arriving in Morgantown at 6 p.m. the next day.
"It was a wonderful, a tremendous trip," he said. "They loaded baggage on the boat of people who were moving, maybe from Pittsburgh to New Geneva, or Monongahela, or Bell Vernon or Point Marion or Morgantown.
"It was a steamboat and all new to me. At the towns, the arrival of the boat was a big thing. The people would come over to the quay and watch the boats come in, see who was coming in, what they were taking off or putting on."
The turn of the century may have been the heyday of the river.
Parker documents that the Virginia Legislature declared the Monongahela a public highway in 1800, but "the depth of the river was measured in inches rather than feet most of the year.
"Rapids above Morgantown made going upriver difficult. Going downstream from Fairmont or Morgantown was not a sure thing either."
River users often had to wait for high water, typically in the spring, to try to move goods.
He says there was more traffic, often timber, on the West Fork River between Clarksburg and Fairmont.
In 1817, Gen. John Jackson attempted the first "slackwater project," but landholders objected because they thought damming the river would compromise fords across the stream. In 1846, Fairmont's local newspaper, The Democratic Banner, offered $60 in gold "to the captain of the first steamboat to tie his boat to the landing of the lower ferry in Fairmont." For two years, several tried, but none succeeded.
The steamer Globe arrived in Morgantown in 1948 with a load of wheat. "He was so upset about the low prices offered ($2.25 a barrel) that he said he would either get to Fairmont or sink his boat in the effort," writes Parker.
Heavy rains had fallen. Lansing Pierpoint, a local tanner, guided him up the channel and they arrived the next day.
But regular boat traffic awaited completion of a series of locks and dams in 1901.
To do this, Parker toured the river aboard various crafts.
Much of the book is devoted to the coal and steel industries that use the river along its lower stretches in Pennsylvania.
When steel began to suffer during the 1980s, so did the economic life of the river.
But meantime, the physical health of the river returned, and so have some native species of beavers and otters and fish.
If you grew up along the river, or made your living using it, you may find this 202-page book and its many pictures and drawings essential to understanding your life and culture.
NORMAN JULIAN is a roving columnist for The Dominion Post. His columns appear Sunday, Monday and Thursday.