Alton

Lemen, Dick
Hartford, John

picture

Alton (Steamboat)
Steamboats
Packets

Saint Louis (Mo.)
Mississippi River

The Alton was built in 1906 at Jeffersonville, Indiana. Her dimensions were:- 241.1 x 38 x 7.3 feet. Tonnage 800, gross and net. She had 1350 horse power. She was owned by the Eagle Packet Company of St. Louis and was one of their finest packets. One mark of distinction was an hexagonal shaped pilot house. At 1:45 A.M., on January 28, 1918, while laid up in the winter fleet on the Tennessee River, at Livingston Point, ten miles above Paducah, Kentucky, a wall of ice came down the river and engulfed the Alton as well as the other boats of the fleet. The Alton broke in two under the weight of the ice and flood as she was crushed against a gravel bar. Half of her stayed there, the other drifted down the Little Chain near Metropolis, Illinois.

Eads Bridge in the background

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Herman T. Pott National Inland Waterways Library