Voyages of Annie, The Great American Whistle Hunt, December 6

Annie is currently in Florence Alabama. Came through the locks at Wheeler Dam and Wilson Dam yesterday morning. These are the locks that have the 85 foot drop…. pretty wild. Going down in a lock is somewhat like putting a ping-pong ball in the commode and then flushing it….and Annie and I are the ping-pong ball. Yesterday was a little chilly. Got down into the 20’s night before last and when I went to get the lines ready for locking through, the lines were frozen stiff. Had to throw them in the shower to warm them up a bit. When I went on deck there was a thin layer of ice all over the decks which added to the interest of the fiasco of locking Annie through the dam by myself.

I had passed Florence, Alabama on my way upstream but did not stop for several reasons. Florence used to be a big cotton center along with Decatur, Alabama which is about 30 miles or so upstream. This time I decided to stop and check out Florence. Put my bicycle ashore and rode around town. I was not aware that Florence is built on a hill which at the time seemed more like a mountain. When I finished riding around Florence I got back to the boat and almost left the dock to head down stream but it was getting late in the day. After consulting a charts I decided it would be better to leave with lots of daylight. There is marked channel downstream lined with buoys on both sides and they are hard to see at night even with the searchlight. My radar is high on top of the pilot house so when you get close to them I lose them on radar.

The marina has a courtesy car and because of the time of the year no one is using it so I decided to stay overnight and to borrow the car today and check out the countryside. Not having any clue as to where to start looking I decided to try the old barber shop routine. That’s where all of the local good ol’ boys hang out and its easy to fire up a conversation.. I learned that there were a lot of really old buildings, foundries and generally old stuff across the river in Muscle Shoals and that’s where I headed. I usually just intuitively head for the railroad tracks and follow them in both directions as anything of interest would most likely have a rail siding. On one particular street I spotted an antique store that was a little different than the average in that it had rusty old farm machinery sitting outside instead of falling apart “antique” 1960’s furniture. My excursion along the railroad tracks turned up nothing other than a lot of old warehouses.

On the way back I passed the antique shop again an decided what the heck….I’ll stop. Actually it was quite an interesting place and there was a lot of really good stuff there. After a few minutes of perusing I came across a homemade organ pipe steam whistle with an inline valve of some sort modified to serve as a whistle valve. Got a little excited for a few seconds and did a little more looking but saw nothing else. The owner of the shop was busy talking to another customer and when I got his attention I gave him one of my “whistle” cards and asked him if he had ever come across any more whistles.

Without saying a word he pointed up to a wall and high up near the ceiling hanging on a wire from a nail was a whistle that I recognized very well. It was a flat top (lenticular) Lunkenheimer (c. 1890) with the original lever and from my vantage point it looked to be in reasonably good shape. Once I got close to it I could see that he had a price tag of $300 on it. So I asked him what he would take for it and the price immediately dropped to $200. And that’s where the serious negotiating began. Suffice it to say that I got out of there for significantly less than $200 with a pretty nice whistle.

When I got my hands on it it was apparent that it was a 3.5″. It’s the first 3.5″ flat top I have come across. I have a couple of 4’s and a couple of 3’s.This one has the double bow-tie type fulcrum like the 3″ whistles as opposed to the 4″ lenticulars that have a single upright cast in fulcrum that somewhat resembles the fulcrum on a Buckeye. Anyway Annie’s first acquisition of the journey is a neat and interesting piece and will be a great addition to the collection.

It’s pretty cold and windy now. I haven’t decided if I am going to hang around here for a while and do some more whistle hunting, or head toward Nashville. From here it’s probably not more than a two hour drive to Nashville but via the water route it’s 350 miles. Have to go all the way to the end of the Tennessee River where it runs into the Ohio River and then up the Ohio River to the Cumberland and down the Cumberland to Nashville.

Got a call this evening from my good friend John Moss and he may come up a do the run to Nashville with me. That would be great to have some company and we can leave the boat in Nashville and drive back to Houston for Christmas.

rb aboard Annie…Florence Alabama