Transportation- Steamboats, trains played key roles for city

With everyone hopping on Interstate 65 for long-distance travel these days, it’s easy to forget the roots of transportation in Bowling Green.

Those roots are inextricably wound together and extend to the Barren River and to the Portage and L&N railroads.

Small steamboats arrived in Bowling Green about 1820. Larger steamboats could get to the city after 1838. A private company devised a series of locks and dams on the Green and Barren rivers. But even before then, the boatlanding was a bustling port where farmers shipped their goods out on ramshackle flatboats, according to Nancy Baird, a retired history specialist from Western Kentucky University’s Kentucky Library.

“You could flatboat (raft) out of here in about 1800,” Baird said.

Baird said that before paved roads, there were just dusty paths that could be used by horses, wagons and stagecoaches. So the river was the easiest way to get around.

A newspaper advertisement from the early 19th century touts a line of mail coaches that could get from Nashville to Louisville in three days at a cost of $12.

The river was apparently a more pleasant alternative than riding in a stagecoach, Baird said.

“I can’t imagine it, but people would ride a raft from here to New Orleans,” she said. “At the Kentucky Library there is an interview with Henry Fox, who talked about walking back from New Orleans after he rafted there.”

The flatboats made of logs were dismantled and used for lumber in New Orleans.

“You could raft down but not up,” she said.

An 1826 newspaper ad, printed in one of Baird’s books, informs the farmers of Warren and adjacent counties that a freight partnership was formed to send tobacco and other products from Big Barren River to New Orleans. J.R. Park and Dan L. Hare said they would accompany the boats that would be delivered before February 1827.

Even small steamboats needed to see some improvements on the rivers here. So a prominent Bowling Green man by the name of James Rumsey Skiles worked to improve the river.

“He was an entrepreneur who really opened the town for steamboats,” Baird said. “He pushed for the earliest improvements to the river. It was said that people stood in the water up to their necks to remove the snags in the river.”

The many goods and supplies that came in on the steamboats needed a way to get into town, prompting the construction of the Portage Railroad that went from the Barren River near the modern day Boatlanding Road to where the Warren County Courthouse now stands, according to Sharon Tabor, executive director of the Historic RailPark & Train Museum.

Skiles and businessman Jacob VanMeter were among the shareholders in the Portage, Baird said.

The Portage Railroad used mules and horses to pull trailers or flatbed platforms along the tracks, Tabor said. Several historians point to the Portage Railroad as being Kentucky’s first, but Baird said that’s questionable.

A city infrastructure project in 1920 around the square unearthed some of those early tracks, but Baird’s not sure what happened to them.

Skiles was among those spearheading efforts to bring the L&N here.

“I think Skiles spent everything he ever had pushing to get the railroad,” Baird said.

And that took some wheeling and dealing, considering that the L&N’s most favored route between the two cities didn’t come through Bowling Green because of some engineering hurdles it had to overcome.

“The L&N line was supposed to be a three-year project but it took nine years and $9 million, not an earlier estimated $3 million to build,” Tabor said. “They selected the most expensive route that had five river crossings and a tunnel to build.”

Tabor said whichever counties came up with the most money by selling “subscriptions” would get the line.

Warren County ponied up $300,000 and claimed to have a $1 million stake for a competing railroad, prompting L&N to decide to build through Bowling Green.

Thus began a “Bittersweet” relationship between the city and the railroad. Jonathan Jeffrey and Michael Dowell co-wrote a book with that title about the line’s history.

Jeffrey, a historian and library special collections professor at WKU, said the first depot was built in the late 1850s.

“It was a two-story brick building,” he said.

River traffic continued to be an important part of Bowling Green life even after trains. Steamboats with names like The Evansville, Emma, Speed, Chaperon and Bowling Green could be seen in port.

Historian Ray Buckberry these days refers to old presentations he has made on the subject. Buckberry’s information states that the Evansville and Bowling Green Packet Co. operated for almost 100 years. Services stopped in 1931 after The Evansville burned at its Bowling Green dock.

The depot saw its first passengers come through in October 1859.

“The depot was decimated during the Civil War,” Jeffrey said. “They built a large frame structure on the same spot to replace it. It was a long thin building shaped like a cigar.”

Jeffrey said city and business leaders worked to get a new depot because this one was in a low spot that accumulated water around it. It was dangerous because people had to cross four tracks before getting to the depot. It would have been near the CSX tracks on Main Avenue; the area today is fenced and is owned by Bowling Green Municipal Utilities.

A freight terminal was also nearby, and while the depot was in operation there a hotel, restaurants and taverns were built nearby.

“It was a busy part of town,” Jeffrey said.

The community continued to lobby for a new depot, but railroad President Milton Hannibal Smith vowed it would never be replaced because he had been treated poorly in Bowling Green, or so the story goes.

“There may be some degree of truth … or it may just be folklore but when the president came into town for a labor dispute he contended he was not given the respect he deserved and vowed to never build another depot as long as he was president,” Jeffrey said.

Smith also was responsible for moving a bustling railroad service garage, and the accompanying jobs from Bowling Green to Paris, Tenn., Tabor said.

At any rate, after Smith’s 1921 death, his son-in-law became railroad president and Bowling Green got a new depot. The building currently housing the Historic RailPark & Train Museum was constructed in 1925.

During what might have been its heyday in the 1930s and ’40s, the depot had as many as 30 passenger trains stop during the day.

“There were four active tracks,” Tabor said.

During both world wars, many people entering the military left Bowling Green from the depot.

Bowling Green saw its last passenger train roll through town in October 1979, 120 years after the service started.

The depot fell into ill repair and a group of citizens purchased the building when it was rumored to be on the wrecking ball list. A now-defunct Depot Development Authority was formed and millions in grants were obtained for the building’s restoration and the installation in 2000 of a digital library branch. The library moved out in November 2007 and the Friends of the L&N Depot converted the space for offices that are now leased. The friends had just opened the museum in September 2007.

Tabor said Bowling Green’s relationship with trains and the railroad is prominently displayed at the museum.

“If you have to find the one thing that was most important to the development of this town it is transportation,” Baird said.