McLEAN COUNTY HISTORY & GENEALOGY NEWS
By Euleen Rickard
After the Civil War the commercial use of Green River involved entrepreneurs seeking to peddle their wares or services. Tinsmiths, photographers and loggers, to name a few, took advantage of its flowing waters.
Some of the first to use the river as a conveyance were loggers. Evansville, Indiana was a large hardwood center and loggers would float their logs down the Green to the Ohio and into Evansville. The upper Green River with large virgin trees provided Evansville with almost a million feet of lumber in 1895.
Loggers began work in early spring, loading their tents, saws, hooks, chains, provisions and cooking outfits into enormous wagons. They made camp and cut and sawed logs until around November, stacking the logs along the riverbank waiting for the rise in the river in the spring to float them to market in Evansville.
Logging was hard work and exposure to the elements caused much illness. Some developed malaria, pneumonia and the much dreaded disease tuberculosis. Ralph Dillas Rickard, a logger of the Stringtown area many times told of a trip he made to Evansville when almost all the crew were sick. He described the illness as one acquired when they sought to get immunity from smallpox. One of the men had been vaccinated for smallpox and when the vaccination area on his arm began “to take” and filled with pus, the men scratched their arms with their knives and applied a little of the pus to their scratched spots. In a few days the whole crew was sick with arms badly infected. All survived but had huge scars. This was a common practice in those days.
Logging to Evansville declined when Livermore began making staves, chairs and much needed railroad ties for the fast growing railroads.
In “Green River of Kentucky” Helen Bartter Crocker wrote, “one of the most colorful characters on the river was a successful photographer named H. O. Schroeter. He was called the Artist of the Emerald Wave. He and his family lived on his floating studio which had a parlor, sitting room, dining room, bedrooms, kitchen and artist’s studio.” Schroeter claimed the reason his prints did not fade was that he washed them in the mineral-rich Green River. He placed them in a fish box alongside the studio. He and his sons, Emory and Clifford, did most of the photography on the boat but occasionally went ashore to a customer’s home.
Another tradesman of the river was George Ankerman who owned a “floating tin shop.” His specialty was roofs and gutters. Some of his roofs may still be seen around the county.
George, his parents and two sisters came to Calhoun from Evansville, Indiana. They lived on their boat until the 1913 flood floated the boat up across the street from the county jail where they continued business. Later it was moved just north of the McLean County Motor Company where they added on to it and lived until they died. George was the last to die, leaving a collection of old things that took three days for Auctioneer E. W. Richmond to sell.
The services along the river have changed, the merchants of the towns have changed but evidence of those long ago times can be seen in the artifacts of the museum. Some Schroeter pictures, a few of George Ankerman’s old things and pictures of loggers of that era may be displayed one day soon.