Flatboats and Steamboats of the Antebellum Coosa River, Popeye and Captain Cummins Lay

Alabama Division 2nd Lt Tim Steadman addressed the Dragoons of SCV Camp 1524 in Prattville on Thursday February 13th.  Tim started his presentation with a tidbit claiming Popeye was an Alabama boy.  The story originated in 1913 about the Oil family which had a son named Castor and daughter named Olive who ran a shipping company on the Coosa River.  Popeye was a hand working for them and cartoonist Tom Sims spun him off to his own strip as an ocean-going sailor.  https://www.al.com/strange-alabama/2014/07/popeye_alabamas_sailor_man.html

The Coosa River is one of the oldest geological formations in North America - the Coosa was flowing before the Mississippi.  Flat bottom river boats worked from Rome GA to Wetumpka AL in the early-mid 1800s trading goods in communities and plantation along the river.  The boats would be disassembled in Wetumpka where the shoals made the river unnavigable and then tey were transported over land back to Rome GA to make the trip back downstream with goods for trading.

In 1845, Captain James Lafferty brought the USS Coosa to the river, the first steamboat to ply these waters.  The ship was built in Ohio and Lafferty sailed it down the Ohio to the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico then back up the Alabama River to Wetumpka where it was disassembled and transported overland to Rome GA.  Before the War for Southern Independence, Captain Cummins Lay piloted both flatboats and steamboats along the Coosa River.  During the War, Lay continued to work the river helping the Confederate war effort maintaining this commerce. 

The raid by Union Col. Abel Streight in May of 1863 was meant to capture the armory at Rome GA which was supplied by the furnaces of Gadsden AL which provided the iron and steel for the munitions factory there in Rome. The steamboats left Rome to avoid capture by the Yankees as these were critical to supply provisions along the Coosa River.  Confederate General N.B. Forrest captured Streight before he could carry out his raid and prevented the capture of the Rome armory.

In 1864, Union Gen. Sherman sent troops again to capture Rome and they commenced by shelling the town as was typical.  The steamboats Alpharetta and the Laura Moore (under Capt. Lay) there set sail in the darkness of night with bales of cotton on deck protecting the pilot house and boiler from shot and shell.  They successfully made it to Greensport just south of Gadsden AL which was as far south on the Coosa that powered navigation (by steamboat) was possible and there they nervously awaited capture.  But, Capt. Lay used the flood conditions to sail over the shoal rapids there and made it to Montgomery where he offered the steamboat for Confederate service.  Lay was not a pensioned Confederate soldier but his family recognized his service to the Confederacy as was reflected on his grave marker.

After the War, Lay sailed the Laura Moore back to Rome using flood waters to navigate the shoals by even sailing into flooded crop fields and he continued sailing the steamboats for years thereafter.  The steamboat commerce was vital in the post-War years to facilitate the meager functioning economy.  Lay was the only captain to successfully sail north upstream on the Coosa River and, the river is dammed today preventing such navigation.  Lay led the Coosa River Improvement Association which meant to build a series of locks to allow river navigation but the project was never finished as railroads supplanted steamboats as the preferred method of travel and shipping.  The Coosa River was dammed for hydroelectric generation began by Alabama Power.  The first such was named Lay Dam after Cummins Lay's son who was the first CEO of Alabama Power, a Confederate connection.