The Kate Adams — actually the third riverboat with that name — was built in Pittsburgh in 1898. The big sidewheeler was 240 feet long, with a pair of tall stacks, three grand decks, and a main cabin stretching more than 175 feet that was lighted with electric chandeliers — quite a novelty at the time.
When the foundry cast her bell, legend has it that the new boat's captain dumped 2,000 silver dollars into the mold to give it a more "silvery" tone (an astonishing sum at the time, so that's why I say it's a legend). Workers along the river swore they could recognize that distinctive clang from miles away.
Several thousand people greeted the Lovin' Kate, as the boat came to be known, when she first arrived here to join the Memphis and Arkansas River Packet Company. The Kate ferried cotton, cargo, and passengers up and down the river, and became so popular that one day — so the story goes — a Sunday School teacher asked a student, "Who was the first man?" The boy quickly replied, "Adam." And when asked who was the first woman, the boy thought it over and said, "Uh, Kate Adams?"
New railroads, fast trucks, and improved highways began to cut into the river traffic, however, and in the 1920s, the Kate Adams was shuffled off to work other routes on the upper Ohio River. In 1926, she return to Memphis to "start" in the silent movie Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Most of that movie was shot in Natchez, and the Kate returned to Memphis when filming was over. She was tied up on the riverfront at the foot of Monroe on the night of January 8, 1927, when flames began crackling from one of her lower decks.
In a matter of hours, the big wooden vessel burned to ashes, leaving nothing in the water but the smoldering steel hull. A reporter of that time lamented, "Sole survivor of the elegance, the beauty, the romance of a hundred years in the history of the western waters, the steamer Kate Adams, third of her illustrious line, has cleared the Memphis landing for the last time." Investigators never found a cause for the blaze.
The boat's owner salvaged the bare hull and adapted it as a barge, but that plan also ended in disaster. Overloaded with 4,000 bales of cotton, the vessel sank here during a tremendous rainstorm in 1931. Days later, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers crews tugged the remains into the river near Presidents Island, where it remains today, though I couldn't show you the exact spot if I tried.
One part of the Lovin Kate survives. Her famous bell, recovered after the fire, now sits on display at the entrance to the Mariners' Museum in Newport New, Virginia.
Or at least it did the last time I visited.
PHOTO COURTESY MEMPHIS AND SHELBY COUNTY ROOM, BENJAMIN L. HOOKS CENTRAL LIBRARY.
