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Mars Bluff Navy
Yard
By
Christopher Amer, Larry Babits, Lynn Harris and Jonathan Leader
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Figure 1. Joe Beatty and Christopher Amer watch the flood-level waters
of the Pee Dee River after a dive. (SCIAA Photo) |
“The river appears to be
falling.” “Yeah, right.”
(Figure 1) That optimistic exchange was often heard during the
month-long maritime archaeology field school held at the site of the
Confederate Mars Bluff Navy Yard earlier this summer. The unfortunate
reality was that the river became ever higher day by day. For nigh on
two years, the state of South Carolina had been in the throes of a
drought, even up until two weeks before the commencement of the May
field school. For most of that time, with the river being so low, we
were unable to launch our survey boat much less conduct a remote
sensing survey along the river in front of the site, the bottom of
which is strewn with hewn timbers and cut logs from past logging
operations and a plethora of drowned trees eroded from the river that
lay just below the surface of the murky river (Figure 2).
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Figure 2. The
river at the site before commencing fieldwork (upper) and during the
May/June project (lower). (SCIAA Photos)
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The path that led us to be
anxiously hoping the
river waters would recede began some 147 years earlier when Confederate
naval officers selected Mars Bluff as the location upon which to erect
a shipyard. Early in the conflict, the South had lost its important
industrial and port services when Nashville, New Orleans, Memphis and
Norfolk were taken by Union forces. So, to counter the already large
Union Navy which was effectively blockading the 3,500 mile of southern
coastline, on March 4, 1862, Secretary of the Confederate Navy, Stephen
Mallory, ordered the immediate construction of naval yards on inland
waters of the southern states. Mallory envisioned constructing some 50
light-draft, steam-powered gunboats at these inland facilities that
would be guarded by the army and protected by their remoteness from the
Union naval ships blockading the southern ports and patrolling the
coastline.
Mars Bluff was ideally suited
for that purpose. It
was adjacent to the Wilmington-Manchester Railroad and a major ferry
crossing, had good water communication with Georgetown and Charleston
via Winyah Bay, and the surrounding terrain held vast stands of ash,
oak, and pine necessary for a successful ship-building facility. The
shipyard was to have 14 buildings, a saw mill, a forge, dry-dock, and
slipways upon which to construct the vessels. While the shipyard was
begun by Lt. William Dozier, the task of completing the facility and
constructing the vessels fell to the yard’s second commander, Lt. Van
Renaisler Morgan, after Dozier was promoted to command the Navy’s
receiving vessel, Indian Chief, in Charleston.
Morgan began
construction of two torpedo boats, a stern-wheel steamer, a steam
tender, and a gunboat, as well as other smaller craft. However, with
his departure in August 1864, it was left to Lt. Edward Means, the
base’s third commander, to complete and launch the vessels.
The gunboat, christened CSS Peedee,
was a twin-screw, steam and wind powered Macon-Class gunboat with a 7
½-foot draft similar in design to CSS Chattahoochee,
the remains of which reside in the National Civil War Naval Museum at
Port Columbus, Georgia (Figure 3). The 150-foot long and 25-foot wide
deck supported three large guns. At bow and stern were two Brooke
rifled cannon, one firing a 6.4-inch shell, the other a 7-inch round. A
9-inch smoothbore Dahlgren was fitted amidships. All three guns were
mounted on carriages that could pivot 180 degrees for a prodigious arc
of fire. While the Brooke Rifles were considered by many to be the most
accurate of the Civil War era naval artillery, naval officers often
preferred smoothbore guns like the Dahlgren for naval engagements,
which were frequently fought at close quarters. The smoothbores had
greater smashing power, and the projectiles could be skipped over the
surface of the water (ricochet fire) to great effect. Also, the smooth
gun tubes were capable of firing a wide variety of projectiles,
including round shot, shell, shrapnel, canister and grape shot.
Peedee’s
complement consisted of 91
officers and crew, two-thirds of that number filling out two shifts
devoted to manning and maintaining the three guns. In the months
leading up to the launching of Peedee much effort
was expended
procuring supplies for the vessel and coal for its steam power plant.
Lt. Means repeatedly dispatched officers to Fayetteville and Georgetown
to purchase coal and supplies. On December 7, 1864, Means dispatched
Lt. Charles Hasker, a survivor of the first Hunley sinking, to
Georgetown for coal and general supplies, and to arrange for a pilot to
get the vessel downstream to Georgetown. However, when the gunboat hull
was launched in January 1865, it was already too late to fully outfit
the vessel and move it down the nearly 100 river miles to Winyah Bay.
General Sherman’s forces were moving northward through the state and by
February were to take Georgetown, effectively blocking the gunboat’s
route to the Atlantic.
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Figure
3. Painting of CSS
Chattahoochee. (Courtesy
of Bob Holcombe, the National
Civil War Naval Museum at Port Columbus, GA)
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Figure
4. The two iron
propellers of CSS Peedee (left),
and a propeller on the remains of CSS Chattahoochee (right). (Left, SCIAA Photo; right,
courtesy of the National
Civil War Naval Museum at Port Columbus, GA)
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In early March, Lt. Oscar
Johnston, Peedee's
commander moved the gunboat upstream to Cheraw to cover General
Hardee’s troops crossing the Great Pee Dee River to join General
Johnston’s forces in North Carolina for what was to become the last
major battle of the War. Thereafter, Johnston, turned the vessel (no
mean feat in a river that was scarcely wider than the ship was long)
and returned to Mars Bluff. On March 2, 1862, as Cheraw succumbed to
Sherman’s forces, Lt. Means was given the order to destroy the Navy
Yard and vessels. Two weeks later, on March 15th, the guns of the Peedee
were committed to the river and the gunboat floated downstream of the
railway bridge, set afire, and blown up.
Seven months later, Acting
Ensign Sturgis Center
(USN) conducted an assessment of the Navy Yard, from which much usable
materials had been liberated by local inhabitants and contractors,
including building materials, small boats, and machinery. Center did
note, among other things, the remains of the Peedee
lying
downstream from the bridge, the steam tender and a torpedo boat sunk
above the bridge with one unfinished vessel on the stocks. He also
observed engines and boilers on the bank, along with two 24 pounder
Dahlgren howitzers and the anchors for the Peedee.
At various times throughout the
twentieth century,
when the river was exceptionally low, various groups recovered
components of the gunboat, including the screws, in 1925, and machinery
from the hull in 1954. The screws are on display in the Florence County
Museum (Figure 4), while the machinery and hull structure removed in
the 1950s have disappeared and become the subject of local lore. In the
last 50 years, several projects were initiated to locate and recover
the Peedee’s guns. During the 1990s, a group named
the Pee Dee
Research and Recovery Team, headed by Ted Gragg and Bob Butler,
received an intensive survey license from SCIAA, to conduct an
underwater survey of the near-shore river bottom at the yard. Their
purpose was to map the river bottom in front of the Navy Yard site and
recover artifacts to exhibit in Gragg’s South Carolina Civil War Museum
to tell the story of the Mars Bluff Navy Yard. The team recovered
numerous artifacts associated with Navy Yard activities, as well as
logging operations before and after the Confederate occupation of the
site. Their exhibition and site plans provide a tantalizing glimpse of
the wealth of artifacts either discarded or eroded into the river from
the bluff during the last 150-plus years. The plans also indicate the
presence of two gun tubes identified as a Brooke Rifle and a 9-inch
Dahlgren.
Building on the results of the
Pee Dee Research
and Recovery Team, earlier this year, Amer and Leader received a grant
from the Drs Bruce and Lee Foundation to conduct further research at
the site. The specific plans include:
• Locate and raise the guns jettisoned from CSS Peedee.
• Complete mapping of the river bottom (both
surface and
sub-surface) adjacent to the Navy
Yard
site by remote sensing and direct survey.
• Excavate significant cultural remains that will
help tell the story of the Mars Bluff Navy Yard.
• Attempt to locate any remaining vessels
associated with
the site. Possibly the remains of a
steam
tender and torpedo boat remain submerged at or near the site.
• Re-locate the remains of the wreck below the
bridge and
verify/refute its identification as CSS
Peedee.
• Conduct remote sensing and sub-surface testing of
the
terrestrial site to locate the building
foundations and
activity areas of the
Navy Yard. Staff of the
Maritime Research
Division (MRD) accomplished the underwater remote sensing phase of this
work this spring using an array of survey equipment, including
sub-bottom profiler to look at the sediment layers below the bottom and
image any large cultural objects buried therein. As a result, we
produced a magnetic and acoustic map of the river adjacent to the Navy
Yard site. When it came time to physically investigate the Navy Yard
and possible vessel(s) associated with the operation, we enlisted the
assistance of East Carolina University’s Program in Maritime Studies.
We approached the North Carolina school specifically because of the
Program’s background and reputation in working on War Between the
States land and submerged sites and because their faculty and staff had
recorded the remains of two Macon-Class gunboats, CSS Chattahoochee
and an unfinished gunboat in Chicod Creek, North Carolina.
From May 26
through June 19, some 20
graduate students, staff and faculty from the North Carolina school,
under the direction of Drs. Larry Babits and Lynn Harris, conducted an
underwater/terrestrial archaeology field school at the site and worked
with SCIAA’s two state archaeologists and MRD Division staff to
complete these objectives (Figures 5 and 6). The uncharacteristically
high river water allowed us ample opportunity to investigate the
terrestrial aspects of the site. The property owners graciously allowed
us to not only stage the entire operation from their property, but
acquiesced to our request to dig numerous test holes across the land to
identify the layout of the Navy Yard.
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| Figure 5. The
USC/ECU Field Crew. (SCIAA Photo) |
| Figure 6. The USC
Archaeological Geophysics Field school crew. (SCIAA Photo)" |
The terrestrial
component of the
field school was tasked to East Carolina University’s Program in
Maritime Studies as a Master’s thesis. It was supported by a
geophysical survey undertaken by the USC Archaeological Geophysics
field school of the area. This lead to three firsts being accomplished
at the site, the first terrestrial field school for ECU’s Maritime
Studies program, the first Archaeological Geophysics field school for
USC, and the first jointly run field school project between ECU and
USC.
The goal of the
land investigation
was to confirm the location of the Mars Bluff Navy Yard. The
resistivity and gradiometer measurements taken by the eight USC
students who took part in that field school provided a more finely
defined area for testing (Figure 7). The ECU team had initially planned
to excavate 202 shovel test pits (STP) established within an ARC-GIS
framework (Figure 8). The interval of the STP’s was set at 15 meters
and was placed within an “L” shaped formation that followed the
northern river bank of the Great Pee Dee River. The eastern leg of the
grid was placed over the location of the navy yard as designated in the
South Carolina State Site Files (38 MA 22/91) and adjacent to the
scuttled ordnance. The testing area covered approximately two acres.
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Figure 7. USC students conducting resistivity across
the property. (SCIAA Photo)
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Figure 8. ECU students, faculty, and
staff conducting shovel tests across the property. (SCIAA Photo)
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The highest
percentage of artifacts
from STP’s was associated with Native American paleo/archaic and a
woodland occupation including ceramics and lithics. The ceramic dates
spanned from the late archaic to the late woodland, and their surface
treatment included rope, cord, and net, paddle, simple and punctuated,
as well as two shards of fiber-tempered coiled clay. Lithics recovered
include large quantities of debitage and at least four bi-face blanks
of the Palmer/Kirk/Taylor Tradition. The team recovered similar Native
American artifacts from the underwater excavations, including a
Yadkin-style point. Although prehistoric ceramics dominated the
artifact collection, historic ceramics and glassware were recovered
from both underwater and terrestrial contexts, including a post-1883
Johnson Brothers of Hanley ceramic shard, and a Joseph Burnett cocoaine
product bottle, produced after 1847.
The resulting
efforts of the
archaeological geophysics class and the ECU field school detected
several subsurface features that would merit Phase II excavations. Two
specific areas of interest revealed by the testing and STP’s were
tested at an interval of five meters and to an excavation depth of one
meter. While the tests revealed the primary signatures were modern burn
pits by the current and previous owners, along with a garden from the
previous owner, the STP’s yielded more pre-contact ceramics. The almost
continuous use of the property from prehistoric to modern times has
resulted in a very complex deposition.
Additional
terrestrial work is
planned and a LIDAR map of the entire area to an accuracy of 11 cm is
being acquired. LIDAR mapping is able to show very small topographic
changes at ground level, even through vegetation and trees. With any
luck, it may help identify additional features associated with the
shipyard in areas that were inaccessible to the field schools.
While safety
considerations obliged
us to curtail some diving activities and modify others during periods
when the river was at, or near, flood stage, the two schools completed
many of the project objectives. Two of the cannon, originally located
by the Pee Dee Research and Recovery Team in the 90s were reacquired,
measured, and drawn to scale. The guns were positively identified as a
6.4-inch Brooke Rifle and the 9-inch Dahlgren. We have yet to locate
the 7-inch Brooke Rifle.
The gun tubes
committed to the river
on March 15, 1865 were two Brooke rifles (6.4-inch and 7-inch) weighing
in at 9,000 lbs and 15,000 lbs respectively. Each was cast at the Selma
foundry (characteristic because of the double bands that all Selma guns
sported) and delivered to the Mars Bluff Navy Yard on July 3 and 13
respectively. The 9-inch smooth-bore Dahlgren also weighed 9,020 lbs.
The initials ‘JMB’ are stamped into one trunnion and likely represent
the initials of John M. Berrien, who was ordnance duty officer in
Pittsburg between 1862-4 before commanding the Navy Yard at Norfolk in
1865. The serial number on the breach suggests the gun was cast in
Pittsburg in 1862 and was issued to a US Navy ship after mid-1862. The
ship was then captured, abandoned, or sunk, and the tube was recovered
by the Confederates. Only three US Navy vessels meet these
qualifications: United States Navy ships Eastport,
sunk in April 1864, Indianola, surrendered to
Confederate forces on February 24, 1863, and Southfield
that was rammed and sunk by the Confederate Ram, CSS Albemarle,
in the Roanoke River during the Battle of Plymouth on April 19, 1864.
All three vessels carried 9-inch smoothbore Dahlgrens.
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Figure 9. One of the three friction primers excavated
at the site. (SCIAA Photo)
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Artifacts
recovered include, ring
dogs and other artifacts associated with the logging industry, friction
primers for the cannon (Figure 9), and artillery shells. Three friction
primers used to ignite a cannon’s main charge were recovered. The three
are virtually identical but differ from the typical artillery primer
types used by army or navy artillery. As such, they represent either a
Confederate variation, a foreign import run through the blockade, or a
Confederate copy of a foreign import.
The team excavated
and recovered
two 7-inch and five 6.4-inch Brooke shells, each weighing approximately
100 pounds and 58 pounds respectively (Figure 10). During the project,
both sets of projectiles were de-concreted and partially cleaned
(Figure 11). The 7-inch shells vary in length, but evidently contain no
markings. However, the latter shells are particularly interesting for
the information they carry. Each sabot of the 6.4’ shells is stamped
with the word ‘BROOKE’ and ‘Q’ (for Richmond) (Figure 12). The forward
band of each shell has ‘LT. R. D. M’ and ‘RNOW’ (Richmond Naval
Ordnance Works) stamped into the iron (Figure 13). Lt. Robert Dabney
Minor commanded the Richmond Naval Ordnance Works until 1 Oct. 1863,
when he was assigned other duties for the Confederacy, continuing his
work with ordnance, especially cannon and fuses.
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Figure 10. Joe Beatty and Christopher Amer recovering a 7-inch Brooke shell. (SCIAA Photo)
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Figure 11. 6.4-inch Brooke shell before (left) and after
(right) de-concreting. (SCIAA Photo)
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Figure 12. ‘BROOKE’ and the letter ‘Q’ (Richmond Naval
Ordnance Works) stamped into the brass sabot that was bolted onto the rear end
of the shell. (SCIAA Photo)
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Figure 13. Inspector Lt. Robert Dabney Minor’s initials
‘LT. R.D.M., and R.N.O.W. (Richmond Naval Ordnance Works) stamped in
the forward band of a 6.4-inch Brooke shell.
(SCIAA Photo)
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The remaining
objectives that could
not be attempted or completed due to river conditions, including
searching for any vessels associated with the Navy Yard, detailed
mapping of the river bottom adjacent to the site, and assessment of the
wreck thought to be CSS Peedee, will be revisited
during a time
when the river is more charitable towards us. In the meantime, the
artifacts from the river are secure in a laboratory at Francis Marion
University (FMU). Francis Marion is the third partner in this endeavor.
When the last of the three cannon is located, all three gun tubes will
be lifted from their watery graves and conserved in a purpose-built
facility on the grounds of FMU. Current plans call for the Florence
County Museum to exhibit the Mars Bluff Navy Yard/CSS Peedee
materials to tell the story of the only Confederate inland navy yard in
South Carolina and the gunboat built there the bore the river’s name (Figure 14).  | |
Figure 15. Drs Bruce and Lee Board members on a tour of
the site. Left to right: Larry Babits,
Christopher Amer, Ben Zeigler, Dr. Frank Lee, Mark Buyck, Jr., Edward Floyd,
Brad Callicott (Executive Director), Mark Buyck, II. Front: Mark Buyck III. (SCIAA Photo)
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