Independently owned refueling sites along the river. Anyone with riverside property and access to wood for fuel could operate a woodyard. The woodyard owner cut the wood and sold it by the cord (4-ft. x 4-ft. x 8-ft. sections) at whatever price the market would bear. Some woodyard entrepreneurs loaded the wood onto flatboats so that a passing steamer could take the fiat in tow and unload without stopping. After the Civil War, steamboats gradually converted to coal and the once common woodyards disappeared from the rivers' shores.
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