Steamboat in Mobile, ca. 1910

Mobile, Alabama's major port city, was central to the state's cotton industry in the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. Here, steamboat workers load cotton and other commodities onto a steamboat for transport down river to be transferred to larger ships headed for distant markets.

Steamboat on the Mobile waterfront, circa 1910
Courtesy of University of South Alabama
Steamboat on the Mobile waterfront, circa 1910