Georgia Is Mapping Underwater Battlefield & 'Nashville' Wreck
By Deborah Fitts
December 2004

RICHMOND HILL, Ga. - An underwater battlefield that surrounds the wreck of the Confederate commerce raider Nashville will be the focus of a survey in the coming months.

The Georgia Historic Preservation Division won a $39,996 National Park Service grant for the effort, which will include mapping an area 2 miles long and 1,000 feet wide in the Ogeechee River.

"It's a pretty big project," said Jason Burns, an underwater archaeologist who worked on the much-publicized recovery of the Civil War submarine H.L. Hunley off Charleston, S.C. It's also the first major project by the state's year-old underwater archaeology program; Burns joined the Georgia Department of Natural Resources earlier this year and will oversee the project.

Built in 1853 to carry mail and passengers, in 1861 the 1,221-ton sidewheel steamer CSS Nashville became the first vessel commissioned by the Confederacy. It was later assigned as a privateer, renamed Rattlesnake, raiding Northern shipping and, as a blockade runner, slipping past Union vessels to reach Southern ports.

On Feb. 28, 1863, loaded with cotton and attempting to escape the Union blockade, it ran aground on a sandbar in the Ogeechee off Fort McAllister. It was burned to the waterline by fire from the Union ironclad Montauk.

Today, at low tide the boilers of the Nashville break the surface a half-mile from the fort. In fact the fort oversees the wreck for the State of Georgia, and will be conserving artifacts in its laboratory, according to Park Manager Daniel Brown.

Already the fort displays several items brought off the wreck over the years, including cannon balls, ceramics, buttons, tobacco pipes and cutlery. McAllister, overlooking the Ogeechee a dozen miles south of Savannah, was a sand fort built to protect the city's "back door."

"It would be a dream come true to get the [ship's] bell," Brown said, but whether it is still aboard is not known. Until the 1980s there were several private salvage operations on the wreck. None were legal, Brown said, and court action recovered about one-third of the items that were removed.

Burns said in November that he was "still working on getting the money," and the survey would likely begin by January at the latest. Actual diving on the wreck would take place next summer, with the entire project to extend over a year.

Besides the Nashville, included in the survey will be a study of Confederate obstructions placed in the Ogeechee to complement the fort - spar-mounted torpedoes and lines of piles across the river. "Fort McAllister turned out to be the proving ground" for Union monitors that attempted to demolish the fort, Burns said, while Confederate gunners fired on the monitors. The result was "a stalemate."

The survey will also include the Confederate tug Columbus, which came downriver in hopes of pulling Nashville free but sank during the fighting.

If the survey succeeds in recreating the battle, Burns said, development along the river can be guided to spare significant areas.

Naval historians believe that the Nashville is the only remaining example of a side-levered steam engine from the Civil War period. The innovation meant that the machinery that turned the paddle wheel was aligned horizontally and therefore kept safe below the hull line.