Celina’s Riverboat history will be part of the celebration Saturday as the Clay County Museum of History holds its annual festival.
Celina used to be a big riverboat town from the 1820s to the 1930s. Local resident Johnny McLerran said the reason Celina was a major riverboat town was that it was the halfway point on the Cumberland River between Nashville and what is now called Burnside, Kentucky. McLerran said most steamboats would not travel the whole distance between the two, making Celina a major distribution hub during that era.
“Here in Celina, we had warehouses where people would order stuff, and it would come up the river and get off at the Celina Port, and also we delivered to Cookeville and other area towns around,” McLerran said.
McLerran said back then, steamboats were the only way of transporting goods to the region. McLerran said many people used steamboats to travel, but traveling and transporting goods presented it’s on challenges.
“They had to find out when the high tide was coming,” McLerran said. “You just couldn’t take off up and down the river cause there is a lot of shoals and a lot of places that you couldn’t get by. So each place kind of had a measuring stick of how high the water was or when the water was gonna get high. The Kyles here in Celina they ran the ferry across the river, and they had a thing they could tell or that they thought they could tell when the river was gonna come up, and you could be ready for the steamboats.”
McLerran said farmers had their own port on the river so steamboats could pull in to take goods or livestock for the farmers to sell. McLerran said back then, the people of Celina had a rough side to them.
“Where the landings were, there may have been two or three boats there, and you know, stuff did happen in old town Celina where people did get killed there,” McLerran said. “I mean, it was a tough, rough place along the river.”
McLerran said Celina’s distribution hub began to disintegrate once roads and railroads started appearing across the Upper Cumberland.
“The roads were the main thing,” McLerran said. “When they started coming through, people started ordering, and you could get it through trucks, and the steamboating kind of fell out on ordering and delivering merchandise.”
McLerran said the steamboats back then were the kind of steamboats we see today, but much smaller. McLerran said some furniture that was transported by steamboats during that time will be on display at the festival. The annual festival will begin at 9am this Saturday and will be held around the Clay County Historic Courthouse Square.