The Boat in the Corner of the Frame

For as long as I have been walking out for sunrise, a riverboat sat on a concrete pad in the park’s boat maintenance yard, on the far shore of the bay from Indian Island. It was in the corner of a lot of my frames without ever being the subject: two decks of white railing, a pilothouse on top, a blue steel hull, and a red paddlewheel across the stern. It is gone now. This is what I know about it.

Which boat it was

Stone Mountain Park ran paddlewheel cruises on the lake from its first years; the park opened in April 1965. Three boats carried the concession over the decades.

The first was the Robert E. Lee, a steel-hulled side-wheeler whose wheel turned for show. It was scuttled in the arm of the lake behind the hotel as a fish attractor, and a bass fisherman found it on sonar in October 2014. Nobody on the fishing forum could say what year it went down; the one piece of trivia that survives is that it took three dump-truck loads of rock to sink it.

The second was the Scarlett O’Hara, built at the park in 1976: 62 feet, 62 tons, 150 passengers, three feet of water to float. A side-wheeler, white with red trim, gingerbread rails and two stacks. She was cut up for scrap on the same pad in late 2022.

The third, and the biggest, was the Henry W. Grady, a stern-wheeler named for the Atlanta Constitution editor who talked up the New South in the 1880s. It was on the lake by February 1994, when an Atlanta Journal-Constitution photographer shot the cast-iron rail around its stairway. The cruises ended years ago; the park’s own answer to a visitor who asked was one line, that the riverboats no longer operate. Duck boats took over the lake tour, and those stopped in 2018 after the Branson accident. The two hulls stayed tied up at the boathouse. In 2020 the Grady got a new name for television: it was the Missouri Belle, the casino boat in Ozark, whose exteriors were shot at the park. After the Scarlett went, the Grady was the boat in my photographs.

The place

The yard sits on the north shore of the bay, east of the Grist Mill, with a low stone seawall along the lake and a wooden dock beside it. It is a working area of the park rather than a place to visit, and it is not labeled on any map, so there is nothing here to go and find. Over the years the boat mostly turned up in frames shot from Indian Island, across the water, sitting on the far shore the way it always had. The trail’s sunrise spot is a short way up the open shore north of the yard, which is the other reason it kept appearing just off the edge of the view I shoot every week.