{"id":37573,"date":"2023-01-21T00:01:27","date_gmt":"2023-01-21T08:01:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=37573"},"modified":"2026-06-06T06:24:32","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T06:24:32","slug":"scott-newhall-eppleton-hall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/scott-newhall-eppleton-hall\/","title":{"rendered":"The Little Tug That Could — Cross an Ocean. Scott Newhall and the Eppleton Hall"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"scott-newhall-eppleton-hall-captain\"<\/a>
Scott Newhall and the Eppleton Hall, an English paddlewheel tug boat that once plied the River Tyne. Scott and his crew sailed the tug across the Atlantic under its own power. Photo by Karl Kortum<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Today, I’ve got some old-timey Newhall family lore for you. It’s the transatlantic journey of a English river tug saved from the scrapper by a group of San Francisco crazies that included my father-in-law — the newspaper editor, maritime buff and adventurer, Scott Newhall.<\/p>\n

Scott’s transatlantic voyage took place the winter of 1969-70, a year or two before Jon and I met. Scott and his partner in foolishness, Karl Kortum, recruited friends and relatives to crew an aging paddlewheel tug<\/a>, the Eppleton Hall, on a journey from its home on the River Tyne in northeast England, across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal and up the coast of Mexico to San Francisco.<\/p>\n

You can read all about it in Scott’s book, “The Eppleton Hall,” published in 1971 by Howell-North Books.<\/p>\n

Why didn’t Jon join this doughty crew on its transatlantic journey? I never asked him, and now, of course, I wish I had. It’s one more bit of Jon Newhall trivia lost to his posterity.<\/p>\n

But maybe I didn’t ask because I knew what Jon’s reply would be: Sail a 105-foot, early-twentieth-century riverboat — a tug boat propelled by paddles<\/em>\u00a0— across the Atlantic Ocean? Who would do that?<\/p>\n

Scott Newhall would. Jon Newhall would not.<\/p>\n

Jon and his family frequented the Pacific Ocean beaches when he was a kid. I’m a Midwesterner, and it’s a freshwater inland sea that I call home. See “The Center of the Universe? It’s a Little Beach in Michigan, of Course.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"Mark-Myer-painting-Eppleton-Hall\"<\/a>
A watercolor of the paddlewheel appears on the cover of a 1971 book about Scott Newhall and the Eppleton Hall. Painting by Mark Myer<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"scott-newhall-eppleton-hall-captain\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Scott Newhall and the Eppleton Hall: A doughty San Francisco crew sails an English paddlewheel across the Atlantic and on to California.\u00a0 Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49128,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,14],"tags":[34,2671,29,82,518,2672],"class_list":["post-37573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-my-changing-family","category-widowed","tag-dont-miss","tag-eppleton-hall","tag-jon","tag-on-the-funny-side","tag-scott-newhall","tag-tug-boat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37573"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49126,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37573\/revisions\/49126"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}