Photo courtesy of the Warren County Historical Society A steamboat heads upstream on the Allegheny River in this undated image. There were once high hopes for the river as a means of travel in Warren’s early days. Those hopes were dashed for decades until Warren connected with the rest of the world via railroad.

A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to go for a run on the Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath Trail.

The trail winds along the route of the old canal. Quite a few of the vestiges of the canal – including a lock where we parked at the trailhead – remain.

For a few decades, that form of transportation absolutely revolutionized that area. While it operated into the early 20th century, it’s no secret that the railroad largely made it moot.

Around the same time, similar efforts underway here to use the Allegheny to affect such a change.

From a book on Warren’s Centennial published in the late 1890s by the Warren Library Association: “The first steamboat to steam up the river from Warren was in 1830. It was built by Archibald Tanner, of Warren; David Dick, and others, of Meadville. It was built near Warren. It went to Olean and returned and went out of commission.”

One trip.

That was it.

But it was more than just a failed boat; it was also a failed idea for what the future of transportation could be along the Allegheny.

“The parties building it had an idea,” that text continued. “They sought to obtain an appropriation from the government to improve the Allegheny. By showing by actual demonstration that the river was navigable as far as Olean, they thought the appropriation would be forthcoming, but they had such a tedious voyage, by the breaking of the steering apparatus, and the appropriation not materializing this object was given up. There have been other steamers on the river; one succeeded in going down, but it never came back.”

Schenck’s History of Warren County gives a fair amount of county steamboat history that I hadn’t previously come across (it is a 900 page text, after all).

One example is a first-person account of that first effort to Olean, which was called a “spectacle.” It was piloted by James and Lewis Follett, who appear to have invited Cornplanter to travel on the boat.

“On the evening of the 20th of May we departed from Warren for Olean, in the State of New York, seventy-five miles above (by water), with freight and passengers from Pittsburgh. At 9 o’clock next day we arrived opposite the Indian village of Cornplanter, seventeen miles up.

“Here a deputation of gentlemen waited on the well-known Indian king or chief and invited him on board this new and, to him, wonderful visitor, a steamboat. We found him in all his native simplicity of dress and manner of living…. He, with his son Charles, who is sixty years of age, and his son-in-law, came on board and remained until the boat passed six miles up, and then after expressing great pleasure with their novel ride, returned home in their own canoe.”

Schenck’s text seems to indicate that steamboat traffic below Warren was much more common than steamboat traffic above but, even then, were limited to the spring and fall – “long intervals of an entire suspension of navigation were of yearly occurrence, and then Dunkirk, on Lake Erie, was depended upon as the place for obtaining supplies.”

The end result of that circuitous route was exorbitant prices in Warren.

“By one route charges had been paid for transporting them from Philadelphia, along the line of the State canal to Hollidaysburg, thence over the Allegheny mountains via the Portage incline railway (boats being placed on trucks and pulled by stationary engines over to Johnstown without breaking cargo) and by canal again to Pittsburgh, thence by steamboat, and frequently by pushing keel boats, were the goods finally landed at Warren.”

The idea of improvements to the Allegheny to improve the flow of goods in and out of this region made all the economic sense in the world to people here. Keelboats (poled up the river by hand) and canoes, and, of course, on foot over land, were the only way to move goods up the river prior to 1830. The keelboats, per Schenck, would stay in business when river conditions allowed until the railroad came to down decades later.

The trip here from Pittsburgh could take 10-12 days.

So the desire for more efficient options certainly makes sense.

“During subsequent years, after the steamboat Allegheny had made her historic trip to Olean, the questions of slack-water navigation and the building of a canal parallel with the Allegheny River were paramount for a time and vigorously agitated,” Schenck wrote. “As a result of this agitation the river was surveyed from Pittsburgh to Olean, and the distances between points, and altitudes, accurately ascertained.”

While that first attempt in the 1830s fell flat, there were other attempts.

“In January, 1852, the steamboats Cornplaiiter, Clara Fisher, and Belle No. 2 were noted as arrivals at the port of Warren with freight and passengers from Pittsburgh,” Schenck wrote. “The Fisher and Cornplanter also visited Warren in December”

The following spring, a total of six steamboats arrived here with “freight, etc.” from Pittsburgh – the Clarion, Clara Fisher, Cornplanter, Belle, Sam, Snowden and Justice.

A proposal to build and run a boat between Tidioute and Warren was reported in the Warren Mail in the 1860s. The ship was named – J.D. James – but the venture never took off.

Steamboats must have continued to continue to arrive here for some reason into the 1870s or later.

The photo, courtesy of the Warren County Historical Society is evidence of that as the suspension bridge wasn’t built until 1871.

Just like the Ohio & Erie Canal, the idea of water navigation would largely fade starting in the 1860s courtesy of the advent of the railroad.

The movement of people and goods are what shape our lives and that’s why I found this interesting – who knows how the future of Warren would have been impacted had the Allegheny been navigable by steamboat or a canal built parallel to it?