The Ohio River, at Maysville, Kentucky

These two drawings are from 1821 !
They're from Adlard Welby's A Visit to North
America and the English Settlements in Illinois.
You can find the entire text on the Library of Congress' site, here.
You must search for Maysville, Kentucky or Adlard Welby when you get there.

The high water of 1917 had submerged the coffer dams at the construction of Lock
and Dam #33 below Maysville. The Jim Wood waited for days, but when water had
subsided a little, the owners in Pittsburgh said to try to get her through, so the captain tried.
He was going upstream against a heavy current, and the pictures tell you the rest of the story.

Upriver from Mason County used to be Ohio River Islands, 1887
This 135 acre island was actively farmed for over 40 years by Manchester's Frank Cooley.

Steamboats sometimes have odd things happen, and the second Buckeye State nearly was struck by a meteor on July 30, 1879. She was downbound at the time, in the first bend below Ripley, Ohio, and the pilot on watch was Eph Talbot. He saw the night sky illuminate to a brilliant purple and chanced to look back to determine the cause, when a sizzling missile from outer space whistled on a long slant downriver, right by the pilothouse, and landed in the river ahead of the steamboat. The captain emerged from his texas room in his long underwear to see what the commotion was, and Eph pointed to an agitated place in the river, now nearly alongside, where the water was hissing and boiling. -Capt. Frederick Way, Jr., writing in Vol. 60 of the Scholarly Journal of the Ohio Historical Society.