[Judy Patsch]

With all the dire news recently about libraries and museums and their finances, etc. here's a piece of good news: The campaign to build a shelter over the LONE STAR has reached its goal and work on the glass walled structure will begin this spring. The next phase of the campaign is to raise monies for repairs to the boat itself. The LONE STAR was the last working sternwheel towboat on the UMR and was retired in 1967. Since then she has been up on the grounds of the Buffalo Bill Museum in LeClaire, Iowa - just upriver from the Quads. She happened to be the last big project of the Kahlke Boatyard in Rock Island when they put a new wooden hull on her in 1957. Here's a picture of that project at Kahlke's, with our old ferryboat, the WJ QUINLAN, rotting away in the background. She had been there since November 1945, and burned in April 1967... The second pix shows the LONE STAR in action in her last years, hauling for Builders Sand and Gravel in the Quad Cities area. The third is a shot of her up on the bank years ago.