Way's Packet Directory, 1848–1994

Captain Frederick Way, Jr., was born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, in 1902, and grew up in the adjacent village of Edgeworth near the Ohio River. Early on, he became fascinated with steamboats, and particularly with the freight-passenger packets still prominent on the river in the early 1900s.While he was attending the University of Cincinnati, the "call of the river" caused Fred Way to leave after one year to take up the life of a riverman, and from 1925 until 1932 he operated the packet Betsy Ann between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, becoming a licensed pilot and master. In the early months of the Great Depression, he lost his boat, and shortly after he began to write the story of the seven-year struggle to operate a packetboat in Log of the Betsy Ann, the first of his many publications.Captain Way was also the originator and publisher for thirty-two years of the Inland River Record, an annual compilation of boats operating on inland waters. And in 1983 he compiled Way's Packet Directory, 1848–1983: Passenger Steamboats of the Mississippi River System since the Advent of Photography in Mid-Continent America (Ohio University Press), one of the seven books he wrote on American rivers and the history of steamboats and their crews, and subsequently revised with a new foreword by Joseph W. Rutter.From 1941 until his death, Captain Way was president of the Sons & Daughters of Pioneer Rivermen, an ongoing association dedicated to preserving the history of Western rivers. Captain Way died at his home in Marietta, Ohio, in October 1992.

"This is not a reading book, but rather a reference work. Even so, the marvelous introduction, the lengthy captions in the photo collection, and the various letters and special notes in the boat bios are captivating and enlightening." (Seaways' Ships in Scale magazine) "The 620-page book attempts to list the history of every packet that traveled the Mississippi River system from 1848 to the present…. The book is a 69-year labor of love…. Fred Way is the world's foremost authority on river life." (The Marietta Times) "The number of steamboats ending their careers by disaster is startling in our current safety-conscious era; on nearly every page there are boats wrecked or destroyed by exploding boilers." (Ohioana Quarterly) "Way's Packet Directory is the most useful research aid that anyone studying the steamboats of the western rivers could ask for. (It) is a sine qua non; and that is putting it mildly." (The Filson Club Historical Quarterly) "A bargain for most libraries' reference collections as it will be of interest for transportation history, U.S. history, genealogy, and just plain pleasurable browsing." (American Reference Books Annual) "Way has sought every source available—government lists of merchant vessels, and quotes from waterway journals, newspapers, letters, poems and songs, to jam-pack a wealth of information into each entry." (The Western Library) "History scholars, steamboat researchers, genealogists and countless others will rejoice in the long-awaited…revision of Way's Packet Directory. This is the most comprehensive treatment yet attempted of 19th- and 20th-century steamboats." (The Courier-Journal) "Reviewing the names of the numerous boats is a fascinating project…. The most pleasing…are those which show some imagination on the part of the owners. Consider, for instance, The Fire Canoe, The Mocking Bird, The 35th Parallel, The Water Witch, The Minnow, The Little Joker, The Vice President, The Why Not. We like, especially, a steamer called Any One. It was built in New Orleans in 1863, had several Louisiana owners, (and) was snagged in Bayou Teche in 1869." (The Times-Picayune) "Way's Packet Directory is the work of the dedicated steamboat enthusiast Frederick Way who devoted his long life, from boyhood in 1914, to their study and recording…. It is an alphabetic directory in order of vessel names and whilst many entries are brief and terse records of basic technical data, for all the important steamboats more extensive and fascinating career details are given, making the book a very browsable historical study of these splendid steamboats." (Lloyd's List) "The name Fred Way was—and is—synonymous with exhaustive research on America's western rivers.... (Way's Packet Directory) remains indispensable." (Steamboat Bill)