Look Back: A life on the river
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Vaught Is Veteran Riverman.
"You might say I've followed the river all my life. I'm 67 now, and I started when I was 12," Clifford Vaught of Parkersburg said.
Vaught said that his parents were born on farms in Wood County. After they were married his father went to work under the ground in the coal mines of Athens County, Ohio, until he died as the result of an occupational injury while Vaught was still a small boy.
"It was about 1912 when we moved back to Parkersburg and I got a job with the Parkersburg-Marietta Sand and Gravel Co. which was owned by Commodore Dotson then," the slender, wiry man related.
"My job was to clean the rakes of the barges. We were paid 25 cents, and a 'day' could be anywhere from eight to 12 hours, or until all the barges were cleaned.
"They had to be cleaned every time they were unloaded," Vaught continued, explaining that barges today do not have to be cleaned by hand like the old wooden ones of an earlier day.
From this task, Vaught later got a job firing the boiler on the Charlie Brown, a towboat belonging to Diamond Coal Co. of Pittsburgh.
Took Four To Six Months
"The Charlie Brown ran from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, a round trip that took four, and sometimes six months to make. We would deliver barges loaded with coal at various points down stream and on the return trip, we stopped and picked up empties," he said.
The average tow then, according to the veteran riverman, was about 16 to 18 barges, each of which held about 600 tons or less.
A tow today will have around 20 barges and, in addition, each of today's barges will carry in the neighborhood of 1,100 tons.
"Firing was hot, hard work," Vaught related. "We worked six hours on and six hours off for $1 a day and meals, but it wasn't long before I was doing deck work on these trips."
Capt. Ellsworth of the packet R.H. Dunbar, plying between Pittsburgh and Charleston, taught Vaught the intricacies of piloting a packet -- a long step forward in about ten years from cleaning dirty barges.
Vaught remarked that they were much more strict about licenses then, during the era of the most dangerous, steam-driven vessels, than they are today with diesel propelled boats.
He told of the many changes he has seen during his long time on the rivers. When he started there were only two or three dams on the Ohio and he has watched the many on the river today, being built.
"But the dams on the Little Kanawha were built, and in operation long before I started on the river," he smiled.
During the 40 some years, Vaught has worked on the Ohio, the Big and Little Kanawha, Muskingum and other tributaries of the Ohio River, and on about every type of boat plying these waters.
Did All Jobs
"I could do just about everything -- and did, at one time or another over the years -- from firing the boilers to piloting," he said with a sense of satisfaction.
In 1950, Vaught went with the Joe S. Towing Co. which delivers barges that have been dropped off from Ohio River tows, to the local plants along the Ohio and Little Kanawha Rivers.
Three years before this time, he lost one lung from a cancer operation, but did not retire until 1958. "They gave me five years to live in 1947, but I've fooled them," he laughed.
Vaught and his wife still live along the river [in Parkersburg] and if he had his way, it would be on the river in a houseboat. But his wife, who says she is a landlubber at heart, prefers her home on the shore.
Excerpts from this undated Parkersburg News item were written by Helen M. White.
Clifford E. Vaught died at Parkersburg in 1979.
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Bob Enoch is president of the Wood County Historical and Preservation Society. If you have comments or questions about Look Back items, please contact him at: roberteenoch@gmail.com, or by mail at WCHPS, PO Box 565, Parkersburg, WV 26102.