Columbiad guns of the Confederate water battery at the entrance to Pensacola Bay
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Posted on 11/09/2002 5:56:07 PM PST by stainlessbanner
Picture this: Three men with Long Bay Salvage Co. arrested a barge late Sunday night.
The concept of arresting a barge is unusual for landlubbers but is the correct procedure for maritime salvage.
Capt. Rick Skimmyhorn, Rodney Thomason and Rufus Perdue live in Murrells Inlet. They found the Reconstruction-era barge about 40 miles off the coast of South Carolina, and recovered two cannon in July.
Monday morning, the three men brought a third cannon, a 10-inch Columbiad, to the port of Georgetown. A crane from Andrews Metal Works lifted the cannon from the water and placed it on the shore while Skimmyhorn and Thomason removed floats. Then, the crane placed the cannon in the back of a stake-body truck to take it on to Murrells Inlet.
“The barge was carrying a load of scrap iron,” Thomason said, as part of the Reconstruction-era disarming of the South.
As best they can tell, the three cannons recovered so far were among those removed from Savannah, Ga.
The 14,000-pound cannon was probably made in Richmond about 1863, perhaps at the Tredegar factory, Thomason said.
The Columbiad was a newer type of artillery piece. Depending on the particular gun, it could fire a shell about three miles. Some of the later weapons were rifled, which made for greater accuracy and range. Some of the shells were solid shot, while others were hollow. They weighed about 100 to 125 pounds each.
First introduced by Colonel Bomford of the U.S. Ordnance Department, the Columbiad was designed for use in forts, rather than in ships. The origin of the term “Columbiad” is obscure. Some believe it was named after Joel Barlow’s popular poem “The Columbiad.”
Union Army Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and his men captured Savannah, Ga., in December 1864. Sherman sent President Abraham Lincoln a famous telegram stating that he was presenting the city of Savannah to Lincoln as a Christmas present.
Engineers with Sherman’s army removed cannon and other war matériel from Savannah as part of their effort to disarm the South.
After his earlier capture and burning of Atlanta, Sherman marched to the sea, took Savannah, and then headed inland to Columbia. The South Carolina capital city suffered even greater damage than Atlanta did in the aftermath of Sherman’s capture of the city.
Records from the Georgetown Courthouse had been sent to Columbia for “safekeeping,” and were largely destroyed in the fires that burned much of Columbia.
• • •
Commander Joe Bull (retired) of the U.S. Navy said the Columbiad on display at Rainey Park in Georgetown took three or four years to conserve.
It was brought up from the banks of the Sampit River, which in Georgetown is brackish from a mixture of river and saltwater. The cannon was placed in a tank of water.
“We cleaned and cooked that thing for over three years,” Bull said. “We used electrolysis. That’s like silverplating, only in reverse. You put in a grid, and it draws the salt out.”
The three Murrells Inlet residents aren’t exactly sure what they will do with the three cannons.
“We filed a federal arrest warrant Sunday night,” Skimmyhorn said, “to establish our salvage rights.”
“We are conserving them at this time. We’ve built a tank in Murrells Inlet,” he said.
The men are “waiting to go back to (federal) court to see what the court says” about ownership of the weapons.
• • •
Chris Amer heads the Underwater Archaeology Division of the S.C. Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (SCIAA) in Columbia. He is co-principal investigator on the H.L. Hunley Project. Amer had not heard about the barge and the cannon.
The federal government generally doesn’t contest salvage rights, Amer said, though the State of South Carolina does when an item is found within the state’s jurisdiction.
“If it was spoils of war, it would come under the General Services Administration,” Amer said. “If they don’t know where it is, it’s hard to manage it.”
The state SCIAA is currently going through an inventory of all naval wrecks in South Carolina waters.
“Right now, GSA administers all Confederate spoils of war. Technically, those cannon belong to the General Services Administration.” Amer said he’s not sure what GSA has to do with the federal arresting laws.
The conservation work “could take years and years,” he said, depending on the technique.
“The Hunley for example is probably going to take five years to preserve. The problem you have with cannon is, it’s a very dense chunk of iron. If they use electrolysis, it could take less time,” Amer said.
Using lift bags to bring the cannon into shore is “really dangerous. You’ve got to be very careful not to overinflate the bags when you’re bringing it up,” Amer said. Towing the cannon with the lift bags requires a lot of care, too.
He estimated the ocean depth 40 miles offshore could be about 100 feet. Water pressure that far down would be about three atmospheres, he said, or about three times what it is at the surface. If not handled properly, the bags could burst when they reach the surface. That could cause the salvaged material to plummet back to the ocean floor, and drag the boat down with it.
Obviously, that didn’t happen Monday as the tired but happy crew loaded the cannon onto a truck from R.H. Moore Construction Co. They took it to the waiting conservation tank in Murrells Inlet.
Awesome story!
BOOM! to the top...
CD
There are also some good ones at the National Park Service sites:
Artillery of Fort Sumter
Artillery of Fort Moultrie
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