Maquoketa River Navigation

WILLIAMS, PERHAM, BARNES, TUBBS

Posted By: Anne Hermann (email)
Date: 5/24/2008 at 02:49:57

Jackson County History
Work Projects Administration, 1942

Navigation of the Maquoketa River had begun in the early 1860’s when the firm of Williams and Perham engaged Wilson Barnes to go to Pittsburgh and bring back their newly built steamboat, the Maquoketa City. Barnes brought her all the way from Pittsburgh, down the Ohio and up the Mississippi and Maquoketa Rivers to “within walking distance” of Maquoketa. Here the forward progress of the Maquoketa City was stopped. Either the boat was too big for the river, “or the rocks, logs, and sand bars were too big for the boat”, and the town’s river going namesake never got to its intended home port. After making several trips on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, the craft was sold to a firm in Minnesota.

Disappointed at his failure, and determined that steamboats would navigate the river as far as Maquoketa, Barnes fitted out a smaller steamer, the Echo, which plied the Maquoketa River for some time. By 1862 Barnes and his brother Joe had cleared many of the obstructions from the river and put a larger boat, the Viola, into the Maquoketa trade. Others following were the 80-foot steamers Casino and Equable.

Business was good, and soon the Barnes brothers began building barges to be towed by their steamboats. The boatyards were located just below the old Tubbs mill, and soon the Barnes brothers were building barges and hulls for business other than their own on the Maquoketa River. They built one hull for a steamboat, the Sterling, named for a town on the Illinois River, but it suffered the same fate as did the Maquoketa City. It never reached its home port.

Steamboat trade on the Maquoketa River flourished for a number of years, but in 1868 it died at the peak of success when both Congress and the State Legislature declared the river non-navigable, and the county began building bridges below the junction of the North and South Forks.