Apr 27, 2015 3 min read

CRUCIBLE – Margaret Mitchell was known in the community as a hard-working woman who for decades shuttled coal miners and others on her ferryboat across the Monongahela River between Crucible and Fayette County.

“Many people depended on her to get to and from work,” longtime friend Rita McMillan said. “She knew many, but outlived most.”

Mitchell was 104 years old when she died April 19 at Rolling Meadows Nursing Care in Franklin Township, where she was living for five years after moving from her Crucible home overlooking the river.

She was thought to be the oldest Greene County resident after Margaret Moninger, 107, passed away April 11.

Mitchell inherited the ferryboat after her aunt, Blanche Mitchell, died in 1952. She operated the ferryboat independently for years after and continued to work on the river until the mid-1970s.

“She just worked hard all of her life and lived (in a house on the riverbank) above the ferry,” McMillan said. “She would never raise prices when everyone else did.”

Loretta Kooser’s husband, Clarence, worked alongside Mitchell for more than a decade on the Arensburg Ferry, and she remembers how hard they worked to keep the business afloat through difficult times.

They split shifts, with Mitchell working the morning hours while Clarence took over in the afternoon and operated the ferry until midnight, Kooser said.

Even as operating and maintenance costs increased, Mitchell didn’t want to pass the added expenses along to her loyal customers, both McMillan and Kooser said.

Mitchell never married and didn’t have children, they said, so the ferryboat was especially important to her.

“She could’ve sold the ferry, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to sell it and give it up,” Kooser said. “That ferry was her life.”

Mitchell eventually stopped running the ferry in the mid-1970s and it sat idle along the riverbank, ripe for vandals and thieves.

The flood of November 1985 washed what was left of the ferry into the Monongahela River, Kooser said, where it sank and remained until it was eventually pulled out years later and sold for scrap.

“She was pretty upset,” McMillan said.

McMillan struck up a long-lasting friendship with Mitchell a few years later. She grew up in Crucible and still remembers watching Mitchell behind the controls of the ferryboat wearing a broad-brimmed hat and dress.

“She was just a good, hard-working woman,” McMillan said. “She just did what she had to do.”