How to Use flatboat in a Sentence

flatboat

noun
  • Workers on flatboats could barely pass under the railroad bridge at Broadway.
    — Andrew Wolfson, The Courier-Journal, 28 Aug. 2017
  • Hundreds of thousands of bales of cotton arrived on flatboats—until the railroad took over—from the vast plantations up river to the north.
    — Gully Wells, WSJ, 12 Dec. 2018
  • The wooden flatboat uses the simplest of technology (and whatever parts are handy) to turn a river into a highway.
    — Wsj Books Staff, WSJ, 29 July 2022
  • Hugo and Helena’s Floating Theatre, a flatboat full of quirky drama queens, takes needy May in, no questions asked.
    — Jean Zimmerman, New York Times, 14 July 2017
  • Portland was originally this river town community, a maritime river community, all about the river trade, steamboats, flatboats.
    — Nancy Stearns Theiss, The Courier-Journal, 29 Sep. 2017
  • An adventure historian builds a 19th-century flatboat and sails it down the Mississippi River.
    — Washington Post, 14 Sep. 2022
  • In this suspenseful novel, May Bedloe, a young seamstress for a theater company that travels the Ohio River on a flatboat, becomes involved in ferrying infants born into bondage from one side of the river to the other.
    — New York Times, 20 July 2017
  • The German immigrants arrived in Kentucky on a flatboat in 1794, according to various bourbon history sites, and trace their distilling ancestry to a farm in Bardstown and in Louisville.
    — Grace Schneider, The Courier-Journal, 28 Aug. 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'flatboat.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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