[Editor’s Note: This is the second of two Back Then columns on the history of steamboating in Western North Carolina. The first can be located online at: www.smokymountainnews.com/internal_pages/mtn_voices.html.]

Commercial steamboating began with Robert Fulton’s successful jaunt from New York City to Albany in 1807, the first voyage of any notable distance made by a steamboat. Thereafter, for most of the 19th century, steamboating became a significant transportation factor wherever there were navigable waters. Many rivers like the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, Cumberland, Tennessee, etc., were obviously suitable, but what about rivers like the French Broad and the Little Tennessee here in the mountains of Western North Carolina?

Numerous records indicate that both were heavily used where they broadened, deepened, and emptied into the Tennessee River in eastern Tennessee. Here in the mountainous interior of the Southern Blue Ridge province, however, I can locate documentation for but two steamboats. Both had wonderfully evocative names and each had an interesting story attached to its ventures. Last week we took a look at “The Mountain Lily,” which, during the early 1880s, plied the waters of the upper French Broad in Henderson County. This week, we’ll turn our attention to “The Vivian,” which serviced an impounded stretch of the Little Tennessee as a tugboat ferrying lumber barges on Cheoah Reservoir in Graham and Swain counties.

The 19th century was the era of flatboats and keelboats on the lower and middle reaches of the Little Tennessee River, primarily in eastern Tennessee. These activities are described by Alberta and Carson Brewer in Valley So Wild: A Folk History (East Tennessee Historical Society, 1975). It wasn’t until after World War I that a steamboat made its appearance on an impounded portion of the river within Western North Carolina. The story of “The Vivian” is touched upon by the Brewers, but the fullest account I can locate is supplied by Lance Holland in Fontana: A Pocket History of Appalachia (Appalachian History Series, 2001), wherein he rightly describes the vessel as being part of “the most unique transportation set-up in the southern Appalachians.”

Fifteen or more years before the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was founded in 1934, John, James and Charles Kitchen established a logging operation on the North Carolina side of the Smokies, where they had acquired 20,000 or so acres of land in the Twenty Mile Creek watershed. This was but one of the many logging ventures established by the Kitchens Logging Company in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and other states. Here in the WNC, they cleared the Little Tennessee River area below what is now Fontana Dam so as to establish Cheoah Lake. After the lake was flooded in 1919, the only access to their timber holdings along Twenty Mile Creek was by foot or small boat. How did they manage to get the logs from the mouth of Twenty Mile Creek to their band-type, eight-foot sawmill at Kitchensville, which was situated about 6 miles up Cheoah Lake at a site where Fontana Dam is now located? No problem. The brothers built a steamboat.

“The Vivian” (named after Charlie’s wife) was homemade. It was a 50-foot long, stern paddle-wheeler crafted from white oak with four four-foot sidings that were powered by an upright boiler steam engine. It was the pride of the Kitchen Lumber Company fleet of vessels collectively known as Kitchens Navy. In addition to the steamboat, Kitchens Navy was comprised of a number of barges, each capable of hauling a huge load of logs, and a steam-powered crane mounted on floating platform that served as a log loader.

“The Vivian” was a sight to behold as she towed a string of large barges loaded to the gunwales with logs up the lake to the sawmill at Kitchensville. Once processed, the finished product was then transported yet another 6 miles on railway cars owned by the brothers. These were pulled by a locomotive named Big Junaluska to the town of Fontana (now submerged), which was situated at the mouth of Hazel Creek where the terminus of the Carolina & Tennessee Southern Railroad could be accessed.

According to the Brewers, the combined whistles of The Vivian and Big Junaluska “let out ear-splitting whistles to seal the transaction and set the mountains trembling for miles.” But the whistle story I like best was related by Holland. According to Julie Sluder, who ran a logging camp boardinghouse on Twenty Mile Creek, “Luther Anthony, Captain of the Vivian, learned to play its steam whistle to imitate the call of the whippoorwill, that was a beautiful sound — more beautiful every time we heard it.”

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.