Office Boat No. 10, U. S. Engineer Department - Bird's Point, Missouri. In river improvement work such as mattress construction, hirdle or dike building, granding and bank paving by the U. S. Engineer Department, the administrative forces were quartered on a single deck, cabined vessel called an office boat. This craft had a wooden hull about 135 feet long and 28 feet beam. Depth of hold about 4
, barges and towboats on the lower Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. In its formative years, a large part of the company’s earnings came from the transportation of sugar from New Orleans to Cincinnati and St. Louis. The photographs in this collection were taken in the summer of 1968. According to a statement by W.J. Barta, President of the company, at a 1965 congressional hearing, in 1964 the company