Interesting News for History Buffs
Shipwreck may be Civil War schooner
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
By GUY BUSBY
Staff Reporter
FORT MORGAN -- Determining what kind of ship was washed out of the south Baldwin County sand last week might take time, but some historians said Monday that the vessel's remains could be that of a Civil War blockade runner.
Last week, the remains of a wooden ship were uncovered near the surf line about six miles east of Fort Morgan. After high tides and waves last week, residents said they noticed the bow and part of the outline of the vessel emerging from the sand.
The ship is about 150 feet long and 36 feet wide at its widest point, based on what could be seen, said Jack Friend, author of "West Wind, Flood Tide: The Battle of Mobile Bay," after looking over the vessel Monday.
Friend cautioned against any speculation about the identity of the ship.
"It's a fairly big vessel, but it's hard to say at this point," Friend said. "There have been shipwrecks in this area for 500 years and while it's tempting to say it's this ship or that, it's hard to know. We may not ever know exactly which vessel it was, but if we examine it carefully and go back and check what we find, we can get a pretty good idea of the era and some general information."
The wood of the ship is charred near the beach level.
The schooner Monticello was driven onto what was then a deserted beach six to eight miles from Fort Morgan and burned in 1862 by the Union Navy, laying siege to the Confederate port of Mobile, according to military reports at the time.
The location and description match that of the Monticello, said Sidney Schell, former chairman of the board of the Museum of Mobile, who has conducted research on blockade runners and naval warfare in the region during the Civil War.
Schell said the Monticello, a two-masted schooner, was sailing from Havana, Cuba, to Mobile on June 26, 1862, when it was intercepted and burned by the Union gunboat Kanewha.
A wreck near that spot was uncovered in 1969 after Hurricane Camille hit the Gulf Coast, said Eugene Keebler, who was then academic dean and an archaeological expert at Mobile College, now the University of Mobile. He said the ship uncovered last week appears to be the same vessel.
In 1969, Keebler, now retired, took a small group of students and instructors to the site to examine the wreck, which federal records indicated was the Monticello.
"We located the ship, and I called Washington, D.C.," Keebler said Monday. "They identified it, based on what we found and the ships that had been lost."
According to a Press-Register report from Jan. 11, 1970, Keebler and the team could not completely excavate the wreck due to surf conditions and a lack of equipment. Keebler said Monday that they reburied the wreckage after the partial excavation.
Parts of the wreck have been uncovered on the beach since then, said Dave Albright of Bethalto, Ill., who has been visiting the area for more than a decade.
"It's been there for years. We've been coming out here 11 years, and you could see it at times," he said. "I never knew what it was. They just said there was some old ship out there."
Mike Bailey, site curator at Fort Morgan, said blockade runners sometimes ran aground along the beaches during the Civil War. He said the best known of such wrecks is the Ivanhoe, which struck the beach just east of the fort in 1864. Bailey said he has not had a chance to examine the wreck uncovered last week but that the description and location do not match that of the Ivanhoe.
The Ivanhoe was an iron-hulled ship, and archaeologists have located that vessel inside the Fort Morgan Historical Park at the west end of the peninsula. Due to changes in the coastline, the spot where the Ivanhoe ran aground in the Gulf is now under the beach.
Bailey said that other shipwrecks could also be under local beaches and that the wreck to the east is near the route taken by blockade runners -- called the Swash Channel -- running along the beach.
"There were at least three or four others that were mentioned running aground, and this could be one of them," he said.
Oct 31, 2006