While living with her cannaller grandfather George Kilmer (1841-1911) at Pier 6 in Manhattan, Pearl Kilmer Wilson’s (1894-1993) classmates considered her a “boat kid.” “Attending school was no easy feat,” writes Dawn Roe, “as it required a tug to pick her up in the harbor and transport her to another dock where a teacher awaited her arrival to be escorted to class.”
For a time Kilmer was captain of New York Central Railroad Company barge on the Hudson River. Pearl Wilson’s father was a canal boat captain for the Dunbar Association in Tonawanda. With so many stories to tell, in 1987, her granddaughter Donna Roe recorded an interview with Pearl Kilmer Wilson, then 93, in which she describes her life as a “boat kid” from a cannaler family.
“When they got to Cohoes [sic, Waterford], that’s this side of Albany… and every lock you couldn’t steer your own boat thru there, you had to have an expert to take the boats thru,” she remembers. “They’d go in like this and then when you come out you were on a different level. When you got to the end, you know where you was? In the Hudson River. There would be 20, 30 boats or so, all tied up waiting for the tow.
“And then the Red Star, that was one of the biggest boats there was, they even go across the ocean and they’d come and they’d tied them [the canal boats] together themselves with a hawser, a big rope is called a hawser, and that’s what they tied it together with; and that’s what you went down the Hudson with.
“And when you got about half way down the Hudson there would be a bum boat come out, and he’d have ice cream and he’d have milk and he’d have bread and he’d have fish. Oh, I never ate so many fish, and I loved them. It was beautiful, they’d be fresh caught in a tub of ice; and everybody bought from the bum boat when they come out.”
“A bumboat is a small boat used to ferry supplies to larger boats off shore,” according to the Hudson River Maritime Museum in Kingston, which holds a copy of the approximately tree minute interview. “As Mrs. Wilson relates, bumboats acted as small stores as they traveled alongside the long tows going down the Hudson River and provided goodies like ice cream. Once the long tows got underway, they didn’t stop until the final destination was reached.”
You can listen to the interview, and read a transcription, at the Museum’s webpage.
Photo: Towing steamer A. B. Valentine pulling a tow on the Hudson River with a helper tug and a smaller bumboat to its left (Donald C. Ringwald collection, Hudson River Maritime Museum).
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