a Connecticut River story retold by Lynn Noel ©1995
On foggy days, you can hear the ship's horn through the trees. These are tall pines, even in the deep snow, but not as tall as the great mast pines the King's men sent down the river on the old days. One broke on the woods trail, and three more wedged and snapped in the rapids at Bellows Falls. But the rest rode on down the river to the Connecticut shipyards and proudly flew their flags across the Atlantic on the great Yankee clippers.
Mast and sail were too slow for Samuel Morey, though. He dreamed of steam -- of powering an engine that would cut upstream through the rapids like butter and cross over to Liverpool as calm as a millpond. And he built her too. The Annie chugged across from Orford to Fairlee as sturdy as a bridge, her steam-whistle blaring loud as any foghorn. Morey used to steam her from Barnet all the way down through Wilder Falls, scraping her stamped tin whistle horn against the timbers of Dan'l Webster's old free bridge. Coming back with a load of pig iron and dry goods from Hartford, he'd be even cockier racing up the rapids towards Wilder. "Run 'er up!" he'd holler, and take a run at the rapids she would, horn blaring, paddle wheels churning, even when the ice ran in the river thick as salt.
Some say folks got jealous of the Annie, and her sister steamer the Barnet, 'cause she made Morey too much money, specially after he built that fancy house on Orford Ridge. Others reckon he was just plumb crazy, tinkering with steam like the devil, and got what was coming to him. Mebbe the boys from Piermont sunk her, out of spite; mebbe he ran her up on a rock or blew up her boiler in a race; mebbe she sunk herself out of sheer cussedness. But however it was, I hear tell she headed downstream from Fairlee one foggy afternoon, and folks never saw the Annie again.
They tell a tale of a steamer drowned down in Lake Fairlee, but that's the Barnet. Morey sunk her, so the story goes, when that New York fella Fulton sold the rights to Morey's steam engine and made a pile of money off the design. The Barnet was a fine steamboat -- but she didn't have a whistle like the Annie. Some days, when the ice is in the river thick as salt, hardpan over the lake behind Wilder Dam, the Annie still takes a run at those drowned rapids. "Run 'er up!" You can hear the steam horn through the trees.