The W. P. Snyder Jr., Last Steam Towboat

The W. P. Snyder Junior is one of the last surviving steam-powered, stern-wheel towboats in the United States, and you can see her right here on the Muskingum River in Marietta, Ohio. Built in nineteen eighteen by the James Rees and Sons Company in Pittsburgh, she spent decades pushing coal and other cargo along the Ohio and its tributaries.

For most of the twentieth century, steam-driven stern-wheelers like the Snyder were the workhorses of American river commerce. Then diesel engines and propeller-driven towboats took over, and the old stern-wheelers disappeared one by one. The Snyder survived. She was donated to the Ohio Historical Society and is now preserved at the Ohio River Museum, where she serves as a floating monument to the era when steam ruled the inland waterways. Step aboard and you are standing in a world that has otherwise almost entirely vanished.