On October 12, 1861,
the first ironclad in the Western Hemisphere slid silently down the Marine Ways in Carondelet, Missouri and onto the Mississippi River. It was not the USS Monitor, or the CSS Virginia (better known as the Merrimac). It was the USS Carondelet.
Over the next three months, while the Monitor was still taking shape and the Merrimac was still being converted, eight more ironclads were launched on the Western Rivers, three more at Carondelet (the USS St. Louis, the USS Louisville, and the USS Pittsburg), two at St. Louis (the USS Benton, and the USS Essex) and three at Mound City, Illinois, on the Ohio River (the USS Cincinnati, the USS Mound City, and the USS Cairo).
Within five months of their commissioning in mid-January, 1862, these nine ironclads, along with a handful of wooden gunboats, an armada of mortar barges, and a couple of unarmed steam-rams cleared the navigable waters of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers and the Mississippi all of the way from Cairo, Illinois to Vicksburg, Mississippi. They helped to capture Ft. Henry, Ft. Donelson, and Ft. Pillow in Tennessee. They caused the evacuation of the “Gibraltar of the West” at Columbus, Kentucky and pounded the Confederate batteries of Island No. 10 near New Madrid, Missouri into submission.
They contributed to the capture of the first Confederate State Capital in Nashville, and on June 6, 1862, at Memphis, Tennessee, in an engagement that lasted less than an hour, they destroyed an equal number of the Confederate Mississippi Defense Fleet in what still, to this day, stands as the most lopsided victory in the history of the US Navy.
On October 12, 2011,
a flat-bottomed wooden riverboat will slide silently down the Marine Ways in St. Louis, Missouri onto the Mississippi River. These Marine Ways are in a neighborhood of the city that used to be a city of its own. This new boat will bear the name of this lost city, the Carondelet.
She will be powered by steam, fired by coal, and driven by a stern paddlewheel recessed in a wheelhouse in the aft part of a boat that will draw only six feet of water but will weigh about 880 tons fully loaded. She will also be plated with two and one-half inch thick charcoal iron on her forward casement and abeam the boilers and engines. She will be armed with eight-inch smoothbore cannon and rifled Army 42-pounders. She will be painted in the Navy tradition with a red hull below the water, black above, and whitewash on the interior, with buff decks. She will be operated by 175 men, some of them volunteers, some who will pay for the opportunity to serve aboard her, and all will be trained as seamen in the US Navy of 150 years before.
This is The Pook Turtle Project, a non-profit corporation established by Michael Andersen, William Andersen, Douglas Frank, and Gary Ward to promote public education of the US Navy in the American Civil War.
The Pook Turtle Project
intends to resurrect the history of the US Navy on America’s inland waters during the Civil War. We will steam the Carondelet up and down the Mississippi, Ohio, Cumberland, Tennessee, Arkansas, White and Red Rivers to arrive at the sites of important Civil War events on each 150th anniversary. We will be able to make subtle changes to her appearance to emulate any of her six sisters as the occasion requires. We will turn the flow of history back to its original focus, the original avenues of commerce and emigration, the rivers that ran through the heart of our country.
We will conduct important research in the design and construction of the classic western river steamboat as augmented by Pook’s design, including the boiler configuration, and the high-pressure steam engines.
Additional research will reveal the unusual cooperation between the US Army and the US Navy that supplied and manned these vessels, and the strategy of war that led to the first known use in the United States armed forces of a unified command structure.
As with all adventures of this magnitude it will require the combined efforts of dedicated historians, skilled engineers and architects, energetic volunteers, and generous contributors to make this project a reality.
The research required will be time-consuming and extensive, the construction will be expensive and exhausting, but the reward will be a vessel as unusual on today’s western rivers as the original Carondelet was when she was launched 150 years earlier.
This floating museum will be a hands-on functional display of a lost era which today is only hinted at by the passage of huge steel-hulled passenger riverboats, and rusting cannons on high forested bluffs.
When the new Carondelet comes steaming around the bend, belching black smoke from her smokestacks, and white smoke and fire from her 13 heavy guns, history will truly come alive in sight and sound.
For more information, or if you would like to volunteer for this adventure or contribute to its success, please contact The Pook Turtle Project at Info@PookTurtleProject.org. Or write to:
The Pook Turtle Project
200 North Broadway
Suite 130, Box 237
St. Louis, Missouri 63102
