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Last weekend Marietta was treated to a wide-variety of sternwheelers that stopped by town to visit for a while and enjoy the Ohio River Sternwheel Festival.
One sternwheeler that has not paid a visit to our levee in a long time is the Delta Queen. She can't, she hasn't visited anywhere since 2008.
I have always had a special place in my heart for the old boat. A tiny photo of it was the first photo that I had published anywhere when it was featured on the front page of Marietta High School newspaper "The Original" in the mid 1970s.
The Delta Queen started life not on the river system, but on the delta of the Sacramento River in California. Built in Scotland along with the Delta King in 1928, the pair were then broken into sections and shipped to California. The 250×58 foot boats would provide daily service between the state capital and San Francisco. During World War II, the two boats were painted battleship gray and were used to shuttle troops and supplies around the bay. After the war, new uses would be found for the crafts. The surplus boats were put up for auction. The Delta King would eventually become a hotel in the capital. Ohio River Captain Tom Greene wanted a boat and he got the Queen after bidding $46,000. It would soon be moving east.
Moving a 250-foot sternwheeler across the country required it to be boarded up and prepared for an ocean voyage and a transit through the Panama Canal. Being towed by the tug Osage, the trip from California to New Orleans took more than a month and covered 5,380 miles. After being converted back to a river-worth crafty, it traveled up the Mississippi, and up the Ohio before arriving in Pittsburgh for a renovation that would take months. On the way it would pass Cincinnati, where the Greene family lived, pass Marietta, and pass Newport, where Greene was born.
The Queen then began a decades-long career on the inland river system, visiting some 80 ports. In 1966 a wood cruise ship caught fire and congress passed laws limiting how wood boats could be used.
The Queen of course was not a cruise ship, it was never more than a few hundred feet from the safety of land. It was granted an exemption to the law. The exemption ran out in 2008 and it became a hotel in Chattanooga. It was granted a new exemption in 2018, but after sitting idle for a decade many of the systems on the boat needed upgrades.
The Delta Queen has always had a special connection with Marietta. Making stops every time it came upriver, it visited the area long before the larger and more modern crafts were even on the drawing board.
The boat paved the way for others to visit, including the larger Mississippi Queen that once docked alongside the Delta Queen at the levee, as well as the modern and steel boats that try to duplicate the magic of the steamboat era.
I have managed to get on board her a few times for photos. It is a truly remarkable craft.
The current owners of the boat, the Delta Queen Steamboat Company hope to once again provide cruises. Progress to return her to cruise-ready condition has been extremely slow according to several Delta Queen fan pages on Facebook.
For the foreseeable future we will just have to get our sternwheel fix from the annual sternwheel festival, from local boats like the Valley Gem, from a large model of the craft that can be found near the lobby of the Lafayette Hotel and from modern "old" boats that pull into the levee from time-to-time.
Art Smith is the online manager of The Times. He can be reached at asmith@mariettatimes.com.