Business at the iron and steel foundries in Kentucky and Ohio is soaring. Automakers are ordering more steel. Steel pipe and steel construction equipment are needed to tap the deep natural gas-saturated shales of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. General Electric has an $800 million program in Louisville, Ky., to retrofit buildings to make new types of appliances. The company said it had hired nearly 900 workers this year and would hire several hundred more.

There are many ways to assess economic performance. On Wall Street and in Washington, data about product inventories, plant openings, business starts and employment are assembled into economic assessments, many of which report that the national economic recovery has sputtered and nearly stalled.

But those same conventional metrics tell a more encouraging story for the Ohio River Valley. Between June 2011 and June 2012, Ohio generated 100,000 new jobs, the fourth leading state in job generation behind California, Texas and New York, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found. In one month, from this June to July, Indiana generated 12,500 new jobs, ranking it fourth among states in that period. Ohio’s unemployment rate dropped 1.7 percentage points between July 2011 and this past July, a larger percentage drop than all but three other states in that period. West Virginia’s unemployment rate in July was 7.4 percent, according to bureau figures, nearly a full percentage point below the national rate of 8.3 percent.

By virtue of transporting the basic bulk materials that make the country work, Mr. McKinney and the rest of the Mike Weisend crew members are afforded a closer and, arguably, more immediate weekly measure of the economy. The details they are piecing together as they drop tows of steel at modern plants in Kentucky and West Virginia, and pick up tows of chemicals and grain in Ohio and Illinois, are evidence of the steadily strengthening and modernizing economy evolving along the Ohio River Valley after decades of Rust Belt decay.

“We’re getting busier and busier,” said Luke Patterson, 31, a West Virginia native and one of the towboat’s two pilots. “There’s more traffic on the river. You can tell that things are changing.”