Page 6 - Demo

Preserving the Packet Boat
At long last, the latest plan meets with success.
BY ROBERT WIMER
As Jim Elson points out in his history of Lynchburg, the Marshall was taken out of service in 1880 when the canal went out of business and its right of way con- verted to railroad tracks. It was beached sometime after that on the river bank just upstream from the present-day Grif-
fin Pipe Foundry. For several years at the turn of the twentieth century, it served as home for an elderly couple, Corbin Spencer and his sister. Access to the boat at the time was from Early Street. A flood in 1913 ended that, destroying the living quarters and burying the vessel in sand and mud.
The iron hull, which was all that
remained of the boat after the flood, was dug up from the riverbank and moved to Riverside Park as part of the 1936 Sesquicentennial. Philip Lightfoot Scruggs, editor of The News, referred
to the packet boat Marshall in his his- tory of Lynchburg by observing that the remnants on exhibition at Riverside Park were “one of the few, if pitiful, rel-
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