Wharfboats, Newport, Ky.

 The River has its own people, who live on it and with it.  They are a strange folk, these river people, as picturesque and as foreign to the usual things of everyday life as can be imagined, rough, rude, primitive, and forever facing storm and danger.  They are like the sea-faring people of a salt-water port, distinct and separate from the rest of the community. It was the Ohio River that made Cincinnati.  It was the founder of the family fortune as it were, and of late years we have been neglectful of our river, treating it something like a thing outworn.   If you would see the river aright go at the close of day when the dusk shadows obscure the sharp lines of the landscape, just at the hour between day and night, when the lights begin to blaze in the city’s windows – go then and stand on one of the bridges.    

From James Albert Green’s 1919 Bridges and Byways: Prints from the Etchings of J. T. Hurley