The hostage turret

The Norfolk area is a treasure trove of military history; you could easily spend a week here touring all the museums and battlefields. Heck, you could spend a week in the Newport News Maritime Museum. Alas, our trip is a short one as we have unfinished projects at home we are anxious to complete.

We arrived at the Newport News City Park on Saturday afternoon after a smooth trip down the Delmarva Peninsula and settled into the sparsely occupied campground. The park is a gem, with camping sites widely dispersed throughout a forest setting. It’s a night and day difference from the trailer park atmosphere of the Delaware Seashore State Park. While walking the girls in the campground we discovered earthworks from the Civil War in amongst the RV sites in two areas of the park. 

Fortifications from the Battle of Damn #1, (Battle of Yorktown)

On Sunday we morning we went to the Mariners Museum which is about 6 miles from our campsite. The museum has changed a lot since my last visit in the 90’s. Millie has also visited in the past and neither of us even recognized it. That’s not to say we have memory problems, the museum has been changing since it’s founding in the 1930’s. Now at 90,000 square feet of exhibition galleries it also has the largest maritime library in the world.

Another thing the museum now has is artifacts from the USS Monitor which was an iron clad warship in the Civil War. Its claim to fame is not that its iron clad, there had been armored vessels before the Monitor. Its notoriety comes from an encounter with the CSS Virginia on March 9th 1862. This was the first time in American history that iron clad warships had met in battle.

The CSS Virginia was constructed on the hull of the USS Merrimac

Note: No photographs of the CSS Virginia are known to exist, only drawings and paintings.

I stayed up till 11:30 last night writing about the Monitor and Merrimack aka CSS Virginia and after I went to bed I lay there and thought, no one is interested enough to read my narrative, so I deleted it all. I do suggest you look at the Mariners Museum website, you’ll find it very interesting.

 http://www.marinersmuseum.org/

Before we leave the subject I do have a thought on the aftermath of this Civil War Naval engagement. While I am originally from the north, I don’t consider myself a Yankee. My ancestors immigrated to this country some 50 years after the Civil War; you might say I don’t have a dog in this fight. I live in the south now, in the middle of the confederate heartland and I can clearly sense that the war is not forgotten, nor Yankees forgiven. As an unbiased observer I contend that the monitor’s turret is being held hostage by confederate sympathizers!

Long may we remember our history

Although some historians claim the battle was a draw, the monitor did keep the Virginia trapped in Hampton Roads until the Confederate vessel was destroyed by her own crew. This happened on May 11, 1862, following the fall of Norfolk to Union forces. I suspect they never really got over that; insult to injury. The USS Merrimack aka CSS Virginia was a hazard to navigation and was removed and scrapped, (Note: the harbor was now controlled by the north) very few artifacts survived.

The USS Monitor was lost to a storm off Cape Hatteras on December 31 1862 and remained lost for almost a century. In 1973, a team of scientists led by John G. Newton of the Duke University Marine Laboratory located the Monitor while testing geological survey equipment. (Note: Duke University is in the southern city of Durham North Carolina.)

The Monitor remained relatively obscure in its watery grave for almost 25 more years. When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Note: Silver Springs, Maryland) warned that the wreck was deteriorating in it’s location off the stormy coast it was decided to remove some of the artifacts for preservation.

Propeller from the Monitor

On April 30 2000, teams from NOAA (Maryland), the Cambrian Foundation (Florida) and the National Undersea Research Center/University of North Carolina at Wilmington (NURC), and East Carolina University (ECU) began survey and small artifact recovery operations.

Ships lantern from the masthead on the turret of the Monitor, the last thing the survivors saw as the ship sank.

On August 5 of 2000 the turret was raised from its underwater grave. The largely Southerner salvagers rushed the northern ironclad artifact to the Maritime Museum in Newport News, Virginia. The turret was quickly submerged in a 90 thousand gallon tank of secret solution (looks like water to me) purposely to preserve it. 

The turret of the USS Monitor

And there it has remained all these years, 14 years last month. If any Yankees want to view the artifact from their ship they must climb a catwalk and peer thru a glass window to the tank below. No one is saying how long the turret will remain in the tank; I wouldn’t be expecting Johnny Reb to release it anytime soon!

Disclaimer: While my turret story was intended to be humorous, I may have to keep a lookout for stray musket balls heading in my direction. During the proof read to my southern wife, she didn't give me her normal approval but was strangely quiet. When I told her it was supposed to be funny, she replied "That depends on who's reading it."

That afternoon we visited Millie’s Aunt Ida and Uncle O’neil in nearby Hampton. Cousin’s Judy and Sharon came to their parent’s home during our visit so there was lots of catching up on family members near and far. Millie got a few pieces of information from Aunt Ida for her genealogy research project. After a pleasant visit we returned to the motorhome in time to take the dogs for a long walk around the park. The park was almost empty on Sunday afternoon and after dark you could only see the lights of about 5 campers in the woods, the closest one being about 200 yards away.

Our campsite at Newport News City Park

On Monday, we waited till after rush hour and then started our journey south. We were only about 300 miles from home and decided to make the trip in one day. We traveled down Rt 13 from the Norfolk area until intersecting with Rt 17. We prefer 17 to the interstate; it’s not as boring or hectic as I-95, which always seems to be one or the other.

The passage was uneventful and we arrived home at about 4:30 on Monday afternoon. The motorhome has been cleaned and put back in storage. We are home for awhile or I should say we’re at the beach home for awhile, as we feel equally at home on the road!