Hello, We've been following the conversations with interest and thought we'd share some things we've learned. The following is about my grandfather's cousin: Captain John Wesley Ekey (1869-1961), was born on a farm near Knoxville, moved to what is now Stratton with his parents in 1877. His father, James J. Ekey laid out streets and started building houses for the workers who were moving to the area. It was called Ekeyville until the advent of the clay and pottery interests of the Stratton family after the turn of the century. The first houses in Ekeyville (Stratton) were made from lumber sawed in his saw mill , the Ekey Mill from logs floated down the river from the Economights forests in the Pennsylvania and Raccoon Creek area. John W. operated this saw mill after his retirement as a riverboat pilot. In a January 25, 1952 article in The Steubenville Herald-Star it says that John W. Ekey took to life on the Ohio River when he was 16. As a young man he floated log rafts down the Allegheny and Ohio rivers. He was a versatile and skilled carpenter and built steamboats in his father's sawmill and operated them himself on the Ohio River. For years he operated the picturesque coal burning sternwheelers between Pittsburgh and Ravenswood, WV his chief cargo being bricks and coal. At the time of the article, at 82 he had a skiff under construction. The skiffs, exceptionally sturdy and built with precise dimensions, cost approximately $100 each. The article is quite lengthy but very interesting. It quotes him "In those days we would haul one barge, 16 feet by 90 feet, with a five-foot draft, and a load of 80 tons of coal. Today, the diesel operated boats tow as many as 12 barges with many thousands of tons of coal on one trip." We got the article from his daughter, who at 93 has many interesting stories to tell about her father and grandfather and the history of the area. In notes from a visit with her last August she said, "My Dad built the Erie without a blue print, that it was steam powered with a boiler and they used coal for fuel.." She has good memories of riding with him in the pilot house as a child and she and her brother and sister all learned the lingo of the riverboats. She went on to say her Dad had bought the Panama. Mary Ekey Robinson has written about this and other boats in her book The Stratton Village Story, 1880-1976. It gives a lot of other information about the early brick, sewer pipe and fire clay industries there. About the Panama she writes that it was the first boat that John Ekey owned and that it was bought in Pittsburgh and built by a boat building company. She goes on to describe it and says that he sold it after using it a year and a half. The following winter construction was started on the hull of the Erie. The lumber, all white oak, was sawed in the the old mill and construction was started in the saw mill yard. When the hull, 60 ft. long by 14 ft. wide was finished, it was put on rollers and rolled down the skidway into the river. She gives a colorful description of the Erie. A book that tells about many of the towns in Jefferson County that either have had name changes or just aren't there anymore is Jefferson County And Her Townships by Cozart. It can be found in the Schiappa Library in Steubenville. Ekeyville is mentioned in it. Doyle and Ruby Ekey