| Summary: | (4:59) Mr. Steen describes the history and operations of the Arrow Transportation Company and the riverboats it operated on the Tennessee River.Florence- Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Robert Steen
April 14, 2008
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Ken Johnson
Clip 2
Robert Steen: The Arrow Transportation Company had its headquarters in Sheffield, Alabama and it was owned by Colonel Wilson, that’s all I ever knew him by, was Colonel Wilson. He was a retired full colonel in the Army and he was from Kansas City, Missouri and he started this company, Arrow Transportation Company and he also had another company which was connected with the, with the river and that was the Tennessee Valley Sand and Gravel Company. He would dredge the sand and the gravel out of the riverbed and sell it locally. The Arrow Transportation Company owned six different boats and by name, one was the Arrow, that’s the one I worked on, another one was the Robin, Norris, Woko, Denton K. Smith and the Rob— Robin. Now, the Denton K. Smith and the Robin was the two big boats for this company. A few years ago, or about that time, the Robin came up the river with a tow of twenty- four barges and I still see pictures around with that tow.
Ken Johnson: That’s a little— that’s about eight more than usual, is that not right?
RS: Yes, definitely so and these pictures was made down below the O’Neal Bridge where they had to break up that tow because, I mean, you got to kindly a bottleneck at the Wilson Dam and so, several other boats picked up these barges and brought them through the lock. Now, those two boats, the Robin and the Stanton K. Smith had thirty- two hundred horse powers, that was twin engine, GMC engines, and so those were the workhorses. The company owned approximately one hundred barges and this company was a wealthy company. And the boats from this company travelled the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Missouri, the Tennessee and the Illinois rivers. Colonel Wilson died in 1960. I was in Germany at the time, and they sent me a— in the 60s, mid- 60s— they sent me a clipping from the paper and he had donated one educational system over ten million dollars, so quite wealthy. And, the company was sold in 1974 and the headquarters was moved from Sheffield at that time and later on other companies bought it out. But, looking back to 1956, it is hard for me to imagine that, that a seventeen year old kid would board the riverboat and go out in the adventurous world of the river. Now, I would say it was adventurous—
KJ: That was a big adventure at that time—
RS: It was a big adventure—
KJ: — I know it was back earlier, I think; it still was at that time.
RS: Oh, yes. It was adventurous and, but, I was, I was a deckhand on the boat and as I said earlier the one that was named Arrow, named for the company Arrow Transportation Company. Now, this boat was not as big as the Robin and the Stanton K. Smith, it was a eight hundred horsepower boat, had a Cooper- Bessemer diesel engine and it was a little unique in that it was a engine room control. Now, there’s a lever up in the pilot house that the pilot would ring up as to what he wanted the engineer to put what, in other words what gear to put it in, what he wanted him to do. And, but that was later changed, but while I was on there that’s, ah, that was the, the use of, of the lever and later on it was where the pilot in the pilot house could put it in at whatever gear he wanted it in to kindly simplify it. And the boat was 110 feet long and twenty- five feet wide and was thirty feet high. Now, it had a, two decks, a lower deck, upper deck and then from the upper deck the pilot house extended upward above the second, second de—, ah, deck. The boat was probably built in the late 1930s or early 1940s and it continued to operate up until the 1980s. Now, the, the Arrow had a crew of ten people. There was a captain, now the captain, he doubled as a pilot, and then we had a pilot and you had a chief engineer and an engineer, had a cook and then there were five of us deckhands. Now, the deckhands maintained the boat, as all good soldiers have to do. You’ve heard the stories of chipping paint; we did a lot of that. We did a lot of painting, scrubbing, maintaining the equipment and they, they looked after their, their equipment.
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