The subject of the CSS APPOMATTOX has come up in another thread and some members have requested a new thread on the boat.  Here it is:

The CSS Appomattox was a steam tug that was pressed into service with the Confederate Navy in late 1861.  Arming it with a smoothbore 32-pounder on the bow and a 12 lb howtizer mounted on a field carriage on the stern, turned it into an armed steamer, albeit a pathetic one.   In Feb of 1862 it was involved in the battle of Roanoke Island and later the Battle of Elizabeth City.  Being the lone Confederate survivor of the battle of E.C., it turned upstream in an effort to escape back to Norfolk/Gosport through the Dismal Swamp Canal.  Too large for the canal it was scuttled near the locks of South Mills.  The crew of the Appomattox had been removed from the yet unfinished ironclad CSS Virginia (sometimes called the Merrimac) and sent to North Carolina aboard the Appomattox to help the Mosquito Fleet.  The commander of the Appomattox was Charles Carrol Simms.  A few weeks later he was the commander of the forward pivot gun on the Virginia.

I am one of the four divers that made up the volunteer dive team that discovered the wreck of the CSS APPOMATTOX in the Dismal Swamp.  We began our search for the Appomattox about eleven years ago. The section of the river we thought it was in held several other boats that shared similar dimensions. Since we were under permit from the state and being careful not to disturb the sites any more than was necessary to identify the wrecks, we had to take careful measurements of their dimensions and use them as identifiers. We knew the boat was 85'x20.5' but, based on conflicting reports of its propulsion (Sidewheel, Twin Screw, and Single Screw) we didn't know if the eighty-five-foot, seventeen-foot-wide boats we were finding were it, and the width of the paddle wheels were missing. After spending several summers on several different possible wrecks, we had just about given up. A volunteer had scanned the area with side-scan sonar, but the six foot deep mud obscured most of the wrecks.

In August of 2007 we gave up on theorizing where the boat should be and began simply probing the mud with long sections of PVC pipe. A long way from where we thought it should be, we hit wreckage. My dad, and leader of the team, dove into the black water and immediately stuck his hand into a propeller shaft tunnel.. The engines and equipment were salvaged a week after it was scuttled. Within thirty minutes of diving we found a friction primer. That artifact alone proved with a high degree of certainty we were finally on the right wreck. Thirty minutes after that I pulled a crusty spoon handle from some ballast stones in the hold. On the surface I initially read the script as “J S Kurtt.”

Knowing the crew of the Appomattox had been on loan from the yet unfinished ironclad Virginia (Merrimac) I called my wife to tell her about the friction primer and the exciting news it had brought as well as the name on the spoon. She searched the online rolls of the CSS Virginia looking for the last name of Kurtt. I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t find it, The Appomattox had been a civilian tug for over a decade and a Confederate gunboat for less than a year. I wasn’t sure about the name Kurtt, so I asked her to check all names that ended with a double ‘t’. “Garrett?” she called out reading the list. “No” I answered. “How about Barrett?” “No” “Is it Skerritt?” she asked. Squinting in the sunlight I rotated the spoon at different angles. Suddenly it was obvious the ‘S’ and the ‘K’ were connected. “His first name doesn’t begin with a ‘J’ by any chance?” I asked her nervously. “It’s James” She responded. At that moment, the reality of actually finding the Appomattox set in.

Although he is reluctant to admit it now, even my dad got a little misty-eyed. We spent the next three summers diving under permit on the wreck. The artifacts were preserved by the UAB have been on display at the Museum of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City, NC.  They are currently in storage, but they will become a permanent exhibit next year in the Civil War section of the museum currently under construction.. If any of you have any specific questions about the wreck I will be happy to answer them.



      Pic of the Appomattox in July 1861 prior to being armed.  It was called the Empire at this point.





      Charles Carrol Simms, commander of the Appomattox.  His father was Sec. of the Navy and his grandfather was one of George Washington's pallbearers





      Dive team.  All volunteer.  No taxpayer funds were wasted on this project.





      Dive site.  Two of the members running the dredge box.  A diver is on the bottom running the suction hose.  Note the happy faces and pristine water.





      Drawing of the excavated portions of the wreckage.  She was rotten before the war, then she was burned and subsequently blown up, then the Army Corps of Engineers cut about 30 feet off when they widened the channel in the 1880's  As you can see there is not much left.





     Artifact display at the Museum of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

Very cool! Thanks for sharing.

awesome!!

Like reading about the marine archaeology of some of the Great Lakes wrecks, but I cannot imagine trying to mange what you all did in that water.

Good job.

The preservation levels of some of those Great Lakes wrecks are amazing.  Cold, fresh water keeps boats almost like new.  I recently saw some pics of 200-year-old gunboats in the Great Lakes and the rigging was still intact.  

As far as our work, the deep mud (sometimes over six feet deep) preserves the artifacts very well.  We basically have to use a dredge to vacuum out a hole in the mud, then go down in it to get to the wreck.  Being in mud and water the color of crude oil, we developed a sense of touch that has given us  "sight."  When we go on a wreck our fingers are moving like digital scanners.  The more we touch the more we "see."  It is suprising how accurate our underwater "vision" has become.  

Most people cannot do zero visibility diving, especially after doing a lot of diving in clear water.  I have been diving for fifteen years (I have over 300 dives) and the most visibility I have ever had was around fifty feet in a local creek during a winter drought.  That only happened once, the rest of the time the visibility in ALL of the water I have been in was less than a foot.  In the Dismal Swamp the visibility is ZERO.  We cannot even read our gauges.  

I did a dive in a small lake once and the visibility was near zero, it was tough so I can only imagine the conditions you're describing would get the blood going pretty good.

Great thread.

A little bit of visibility is worse than none at all.  With a little visibility, you revert back to trying to see instead of feel and you don't find anything with your eyes due to silt and leaves covering up everything.  If I am in two feet or less of visibility I usually close my eyes.

I hadn't really though about it that way but it makes sense.

Thanks for the thread!  My wife's family lives in E.C.  I am going to the museum my next trip there.

Awesome work, and thanks for sharing the story!  

this is awesome. not trying to be an asshole but 300 dives isnt that much- in shitty vis its a hell of a lot tho

(I have around 500 in about 4 years... but I worked at a dive shop- I recommend it)

Very nice work.  

Very cool. Thanks for your efforts.

The display is in storage until the Civil War display is built.  I assume the Civil War section will be finished by Feb of 2012 since that will be the 150th anniversary of the Battle of E.C.  They want to capitalize on the anniversary and have a big draw.  

My dad is from E.C. too.

Yeah, you dive shop guys with your discounted gear and easy access to water.  

Overall we spent almost a hundred days in the Dismal Swamp.  We usually averaged 3 divers on each trip and each diver used two tanks, so technically that ended up being six dives per day.  I bet I have more bottom time, in less than ten feet of water and not moving much we usually get 90 minutes out of an 80 cu/ft tank.  That's 9 hours of dive time spread between three divers per day.  

Way cool. I personally do not feel that taxpayer dollars would have been a waste in this case- In fact I can imagine PLENTY of areas where those dollars could be removed and re-appropriated to something as important as this and I'd have no complaints. Great job!

Cool.

Why the effort for this boat in particular?

The Confederacy had very few boats, so any that are found are rare, especially gunboats that participated in a battle.  Also, my dad grew up near there and always heard stories of the Appomattox disappearing into the swamp, so it was a quest for him.  Also the State and other well-funded private companies have looked for it for  more than twenty years, so it was a challenge.  The State guys later admitted that they didn't think we had a chance of finding it when they issued us a permit.

That is too cool.  Being from NC I guess it means more to us, being that we grew up with NC history being taught to us and hearing about it from an early age.  I was always fascinated by the civil war boats, especially the armored ones  and how the battles on the coast affected the course of the war.

After we wrapped up the final dives on the Appomattox, I began writing a book entitled "Diving the Dismal" that gave a good background into the dive team (one of the guys has been diving since 1962 and found Civil War wrecks like the Underwriter and the Pickett) the history of the boat, and our quest to find it.   Just as I was getting into it we discovered several new sites that are not Civil War related but predate it by more than a hundred years.  We attained a permit for these sites and are currently working on them, so the book is on hold until we see how these sites turn out.

I guess, technically, tax payers money was used because we did do it under the guidance of the Underwater Archeology Branch of the NC Dept. of Cultural Resources.  They also preserved some of the items that we could not with our limited lab.  There were some gov. funds spent, but there would have never been enough $ in the state budget to spend this kind of time on this wreck.  

I found some more pics.



This is one of the tools we were loaned AFTER we found the Appomattox.  The state couldn't get it to work properly so they bought a new one ($25,000) and loaned us this 1973 vintage magnetometer.  This guy running it had it working within a few hours.  We used it to locate twelve more wrecks in that small area. We are starting to call this area "The Graveyard of the Dismal."





An outline of the Appomattox's remains.  We tied a float to every rib that was left.





A photo of the 32 pounder mounted on a similiar tug/gunboat the TEASER.  The Appomattox's bow gun would have looked the same.





The original locks at the Chesapeake and Delaware canal in Chesapeake City, Maryland.  The Appomattox was originally named the EMPIRE when it was built in 1850.  It spent its pre-war years here, likely towing barges and carrying passengers.

Cool.

Not trying to pimp my book, well maybe a little, but in the nearly ten years we spent looking for this boat, I got bored and wrote a novel based on our search.  

The real inspiration for the book came when my father and I  almost got into a gunfight with some real -life pot growers at our dive site one morning.  I heard their boat coming so I dropped the magazine of snakeshot from my USP-45 and slammed in a mag full of hollowpoints, leaving a round of snakeshot chambered.  Keeping my hand on the gun, I eased it into the top of my dive bag and waited.   When they rounded the bend the guy in the front of the boat got wild-eyed and shoved his hand into a small knapsack at his feet.  At any moment I expected him to snatch a gun from the bag.  It would have gotten bad after that.  We told them we were looking for old bottles (an excuse we often use as a cover story) and a look of relief crossed their faces.  We didn't ask what was in the burlap sacks that filled their little boat.

I often wondered how that first round of snakeshot would have done if a gunfight had ensued.  That event sparked the genesis of Turner's Cut.  A few weeks later I was watching a yard worker use a leafblower to get the trash out of a parking lot.  Ever notice a yardworker with a leafblower?  Neither does anyone else.  Doesn't the nozzle look like a great place to stuff a suppressed weapon?   That event inspired the ending.  

Right now it is only on Amazon as an e-book for the Kindle.

If nothing else there is a lot of detail about diving in black water with a lot of history and some unique gunfights mixed in.  No sex though, the characters are all married.

Check it out here:

Turner's Cut

P.S. if this is a problem to post this please let me know.  I don't see anything in the rules against it, but I could have missed it.

Sweet!

Wrecks have always interested me, I just got to get certified though, it seems even year up here they find something in the lakes.

Great post!

My wife is/was a Sims.  This is her first name actually. We would love to see some of the things you found. We live in New Bern.

Good job, preserving history

Let me get some things together on Charles Carroll Simms and I'll email you later this weekend.  Along with everything else, he commanded what is believed to be the very first purpose-built icebreaker in the Navy.  His mission was to rescue an Artic expedition that had been missing for two years.  He was successful and returned to the cheering crowds in New York.  He was also one of the officers to meet the Japanese Officers when they toured the US in the 1840's.  We have also located a great-great-great... grandson who has a diary that Simms kept on a tour to Brazil on a Man-o-war in the 1840's.  He was quite the poet.  The Appomattox was likely the lowest point in his naval career.

I sent you an IM about your novel a couple of days ago.  Did you get it?

I did. I thought I responded. I'll look again.  We need to meet to have a beer or seven.  I think she is form James Marion Sims (inventer of the specula and the first OB/GYN in S.C. I do not know if they are related.)

Freaking cool, that's the kind of diving that's fun....finding something that's part of our history. A friend of mine was involved in the Hunley expedition and while not at the same level, you and your friends have done something great. Kudos....

Man that is really cool.  

Thanks for sharing.

If the South would have had a few more boats, we could've  kicked the crap out of those darn yankee's

They had plenty of boats, they just kept "destroying them to prevent capture."  The running joke among Confederate naval historians is there was always a member of the crew with a torch in his hand asking, "Can we burn it yet?"

Wow. That is pretty cool!!!!

No msg in the inbox.  I live in Wake Forest now, but I visit my dad in Blounts Creek about once a month.  A side trip to New bern wouldn't be out of my way at all.  Within the next year or so we want to build a house (actually move and restore a 200 yr old house) to my dad's farm.  I just have to finish my current 200 yr old house in Wake Forest first.

Very neat, thanks for sharing your work.

One of the best posts EVAH!
Always been fascinated by this sort of stuff.
Thanks for sharing.

There will be an effort to raise/recover what they can, of a boat that was part of Joshua Barney's fleet upriver from me next week.
Fleet was scuttled in 1812 to keep the Brits from getting far enough up river to cross over to DC and burn it.
Didn't work.)

Quite a few ships located around here, but near 200 years of sediment on them.

LOL, I may just run upriver and "fish" nearby to see what I can see.
Course, if it's 102F again, like today, maybe not!

Again, thanks for sharing!

Very Cool.  I wish they raised more of these historical wrecks.  The Appomattox will never be raised due to its condition, but who knows, someday a historical boat may make its way back out of the swamp.

Wow!  Another Corn-fed ship discovered.  Thank you for sharing.

Can you re-post at this Civil War website?  Civil War Talk

I don't know what the problem is, but that site kicks me off and closes the window.  I'll try to register again later, but feel free to link this page on there.  

This isn't new news, the press realeases were sent out almost a year and a half ago.  Nobody except the Elizabeth City paper published anything more than a short AP blurb.  
It was quite the wimper on what I thought would be a roaring story.  Nobody seemed to care at the time and I am quite suprised by all the great feedback here.  Thanks to everyone for their encouraging words.

I'll check it out.  Dad made the pilgrimage to Charleston to see the Hunley last year.  I understand the preservation work is done and it will be on display soon.  I'll go as soon as my young family will allow.  

Treasurediver-

Just wondering, since the depth was so shallow, why didn't you use a compressor/mask setup?  Too restrictive, or what?

Very cool post, thanks.

Talk about being right smack-dab in the middle of history...

Good job, man.

Thanks for posting.

Very exciting to read.

+1 and the best one I'll see today.

Thanks for sharing the story and pictures.

I love reading about this kind of stuff!  I'd love to dive on wrecks but I don't have the time, money nor locations to do so.  I'll just be happy reading about it.  

I'd like to see them recover the CSS Georgia out of the Savannah River before the Corps of Engineers dredges it out of existence.  I've seen some of the artillery recovered from her but there are still parts of the hull, armor and some guns remaining on the bottom.  There's no telling what other small artifacts remain buried in the mud.

We already have enough dangling stuff with an anchor line, and the dredge requires two hoses in the water plus we already have a gas water pump running.  There is also a centerline rope with markers for orientation and records, as well as an occasional tag line to stay on site and not wander off. These always get tangled up and it is nearly impossible to untangle them in zero visibility.  I can only imagine a surface-fed setup would tangle even worse.  Dad does have his own Max Air 35 scuba tank air compressor, so we can fill our tanks at home.  He got it almost new for $400.  A guy bought a sailboat and it had the compressor on it.  He didn't know what the compressor was worth.  Luckily, Dad did.

wow this is great

thank you for sharing this.

I just love stuff like this.

stay safe

Yeah, I recently read about the L. R. Doty and she's in an amazing state of preservation, especially considering she's over 110 years old.

Video of the find here.

Great work! I'm fascinated by old ship wrecks and would love to learn to dive one of these days, so I can dive some of the local wrecks on Erie. Thanks for posting this!