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Posted on Sunday, July 6, 2003                                                      Articles about The Hunley, The Monitor and several ships and their conservation plans

'SILENTLY SPEAKS'

Hunley organizers must bank on keeping that captivation. The Hunley wasn't well-known outside the region before its notoriety as the first submarine to sink an enemy ship was promoted heavily to support its recovery three years ago.

Now it draws international interest, cradled in a sling in a slick conservation lab on the former Charleston Naval Base, an operation that is the envy of other conservators.

The lab was paid for partly with $2.9 million in state and federal money and with contributions and equipment donations totaling about $1 million. Friends of the Hunley is a membership support group with limited funds.

Questions about the museum routinely are directed to one man, state Sen. Glenn McConnell, who has driven the project from the beginning. He talks about developing a "quasi-public private partnership."

He and other organizers are looking to build a freestanding museum in one of three locations away from the conservatory. McConnell stresses the need for waterfront exposure, talks about ferrying visitors back
and forth, possibly in a Disneylike replica of the USS Housatonic, the warship the Hunley sunk.

At the conservatory, almost as popular as the ghostly hulk of the boat itself is a mock-up built for the Turner Network Television movie "The Hunley," where visitors can scrunch their way inside, sit
at the bench and turn the propeller crank.
The Confederate "fishboat" doesn't have the reams of historic archives that accompany the Monitor. What it has is the secrecy of its development, the mystery of how it sank, the spellbinding coin.

"The mystique of the Hunley is such that it silently speaks to visitors," McConnell said. "We know so little about it, and it's the mystery that attracts people."

Organizers hope the stories uncovered by study of the submarine and human remains continue to captivate the public.

"We've got the brains of every crewman. It defies people's imaginations when you tell them that. We've got the shoes intact," McConnell said.

Much of the appeal of the Hunley Museum, though, will be in interactive displays, he said.

"We're not going to build a glass box, a sterile glass box," said McConnell, who talks about using virtual reality, lasers and forensics to evoke the Hunley down to the individual faces of the crewmen. "We should be able to recreate the voyage like you're sitting there and they're sitting around you."

What McConnell has in mind is something similar to what he experienced at an exhibit of artifacts from the doomed ocean liner Titanic. He wrapped his fingers around a replica steering wheel and
worked facsimile controls. Through the wonders of computer simulation, he peered over the liner's bow, approached the iceberg that mauled it and tried to avoid the collision.

His ticket to the exhibit, a reproduction of a Titanic boarding pass, assigned him the name of an actual passenger. Not until the end did he find out whether "he" survived.

While the Hunley Museum could be chock full of mock-ups and virtual reality, the sub's final resting place might never be truly hands-on.

The goal is to exhibit it in dry air, with visitors maybe close enough to peek inside. But McConnell doesn't think they will be allowed to climb aboard. How close the public would get to the
submarine depends on how well it can be protected, he said.

At the conservatory now, the Hunley sits well below the viewing platform. Entering the vast, sterile warehouse and seeing the submarine in its coffin like tank, one gets the sense of it lying in state.

The conservatory was designed to assure preservation and to handle human remains, McConnell said. Public tours were almost an afterthought, triggered by the huge response to a single viewing
offered shortly after the boat's recovery.

McConnell also is counting on the appeal of the $3 million Peery collection, not yet available to the public, bought by the state for the state Hunley Commission. The Civil War maritime collection
includes Union and Confederate pieces ranging from swords, flags, books, maps and models to 28 oil paintings and artifacts such naval china.

He calls it the world's greatest 19th century Southern maritime collection.

McConnell is confident the museum can draw people over the long haul.

"In a warehouse on a closed Navy base, only open a day and a half each week, the Hunley has proven she is a sought-after attraction," he wrote in The Post and Courier in January in response to criticisms
of the museum's projected cost.

Yet attendance is dropping at the improvised weekend tours now offered for $10.

The conservatory can accommodate 40 people per tour, 1,260 per weekend. It's drawn more than 100,000 since it opened for tours in 2000. But in 2002, the first year it was open for tours consistently,
it drew 46,000, about two-thirds the capacity. Through June 22 this year, it had drawn 18,000.

Interactive displays are time-consuming, limiting the number of visitors the site can accommodate.

The American History Museum is the third-most visited museum in the country, drawing as many as 6 million people per year. That's too many to move through many interactive displays, said Gardner, the
associate director.
"When you're talking about huge numbers of people, getting through an 'immersive' experience is really quite difficult. I don't think that the Hunley experience would be accessible to them," he said.


'THE BOON'
Before the first tourist steps into a Hunley Museum, the project must
find a site, partners and lots of money.

The $30 million campaign to build the Monitor Center wing seeks one-third in federal money; one-third in state and local money; and one-third in corporate, foundation and individual grants and
contributions. About one-third of the total has been raised, mostly in federal and state money. Architects are at work.

The $40 million that Hunley organizers expect it will cost to build their showcase museum is a rough estimate based on presentations made with bids by three cities -- Charleston, Mount Pleasant and North Charleston. There are no plans; organizers aren't that far yet.

The bids ranged from $5 million to $11 million. McConnell rejected them, and said later none of the presentations provided enough of a public-partner commitment for Hunley organizers to be able to seek
grants and federal money.

Mount Pleasant rescinded its first bid to build the museum at the popular Patriot's Point warship tourist attraction, and the town committed money it set aside for the Hunley to another project.

Charleston, after offering to build the museum at the popular S.C. Aquarium complex tourist area, is now suggesting building at the more traditional Charleston Museum, away from the waterfront.

McConnell says he won't settle for anything less than a world-class museum, and he doesn't doubt the fishboat can draw enough tourists.

"The municipalities wouldn't be offering all the money they're offering unless they knew the boon it's going to be," he said.

The Hunley's Confederate heritage stops more than a few people and might make finding support more difficult out of region than it was for the Monitor. Organizers of other Confederacy-oriented museums
don't think that will limit its popularity.

"For the public as a whole, I don't think it ever makes a difference, especially when you're talking about technological innovation," said Virginia War Museum Director John V. Quarstein, who has had a hand in creating some 14 regional museums.

"In the long run they pay for themselves. Will the visitors come immediately? You never know."
 

Ill-fated gunboat decaying in N.C. shed

BY RON MENCHACA AND BO PETERSEN
Of The Post and Courier Staff
KINSTON, N.C.--The rotted timbers of its hull resemble the exposed ribs of some devoured animal. When it comes to restoring historic boats, the CSS Neuse is a cautionary tale.

Unlike high-profile projects in South Carolina and Virginia, the 40-year effort to preserve the ill-fated gunboat in a state historic site is struggling for an audience.

In contrast to the well-funded public-private H.L. Hunley and USS Monitor efforts, North Carolina has made only halfhearted stabs at conserving the Neuse to draw more tourists to a tiny old tobacco and mill town.

If the Neuse hadn't gone down in its prime, scuttled by its own crew during a Union raid, admirers say the "gray ghost" might today rival the popularity of the Hunley or Monitor. The historic site now is getting visitors who stop by after seeing the Hunley.

Much like its troubled years of service during the war, which were marked by lack of funds and an unpredictable river, what's left of the Neuse today sits decaying in an open-air shed, its wood flaking away more each day.

"I think this site has been overlooked in a lot of ways," said Andrew Duppstadt, assistant site manager at the Neuse historic site. "This site has never really been a priority."

In contrast to the almost obsessive planning that went into the Hunley's retrieval, the Neuse's hull was plucked from a shallow area of the Neuse River in 1963.

But three local businessmen who organized the haphazard recovery were not motivated by conserving the ironclad, one of 22 commissioned by the Confederate Navy. "They thought they were going to find gold or some other valuable," Duppstadt said.

Eventually, the state of North Carolina became the ship's caretaker.

In 1999, Hurricane Floyd flooded the Neuse River and the river bottomland shed that housed the boat. Although it was later moved to a new shed on higher ground, conditions are still less than ideal. A $3 million renovation to the park that will include some bolstering
of the boat's shed and supports is sorely needed, said Duppstadt, who used to walk the hull before it sounded like "corn flakes." Each morning he picks up the pieces that have fallen off overnight.

Wreckage of ironclad Merrimack becomes stuff of legend

BY BO PETERSEN AND RON MENCHACA
Of The Post and Courier Staff
NEWPORT NEWS, Va.--News that a recent underwater survey might have found remnants of the ironclad Merrimack touched off fervor among Civil War buffs already stirred up by the recoveries of two other legendary warships, the Monitor and the Hunley.

A follow-up survey is planned, but the myth of the wreck might be all that's there. After more than a century of burning, exploding, salvaging, scavenging and souvenir hunting, there's not likely to be much more.

The survey, performed by a shipping company looking to extend its piers, turned up the latest report in a century's worth that a boiler from one of the more famous naval battlers in history might be in the Chesapeake Bay near Norfolk.

But the ironclad's boilers were square, and the one the survey found is round. The round one has been "discovered" before, said John Broadwater, manager of the federal Monitor National Marine Sanctuary. "We've heard about the so-called Virginia boiler for years. It's a local legend."

The Merrimack, or the CSS Virginia, fought the USS Monitor to a Civil War draw in what is considered the baptism of iron warships. The H.L. Hunley is considered the first submarine to sink an enemy ship, off Charleston Harbor in 1862.

The Virginia was built from the scavenged Merrimack, a Union warship. But nobody called it the Virginia, one historian notes. In 1862, it ran aground off Craney Island, and the Confederates burned it rather than lose it to the Union.

When the flames reached the black powder magazine, the ship blew up. After the war, salvage companies removed two boilers and parts of the hull. To clear the shipping channel, they took what was left of the ship and blew it up again. Its larger shanks were dragged off to a nearby shipyard.

Then collectors started picking at the remnants, and mistakenly at the remnants of any other shipwreck around it. The joke around Hampton Roads is that if you took all the iron and all the wood supposedly collected from the Merrimack, you'd have enough to outfit
a fleet of ironclads.
Watermen in the clam-rich area used to use clam tongs to nip away at the USS Cumberland, in shallow water near the Merrimack wreck. The Cumberland was the first Union sloop to be sunk by the Virginia.

"Trinkets were made. Coins were made. There have been stories that people have chunks of metal and claim it's from the Virginia," said Justin Lyons, spokesman of the Mariners' Museum, where the Monitor's turret is being conserved and displayed.

It seems everybody in Hampton Roads has a piece of what they think is the Merrimack.

John Hightower, the museum's president, sheepishly pulls out his own souvenir for a visitor. It's a pencil-sized shaft of wood on which someone has written "piece of Merrimack." He got it from a neighbor who had it lying around. It apparently was part of a ship's plumbing.

There are big artifacts of the Merrimack around. Its anchor and shaft are at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. The Mariners' Museum has a cannonball-dented armor plate thought to have come from the ship.

Some experts say significant artifacts might still rest in the bottom muck.

Toss in the recoveries of the Monitor turret and an intact Hunley, and it doesn't take much to stir the public's imagination.

Broadwater says there can't be much of the ship left underwater. But even he can't quite let it go. He's a diver and in the shifting murk near the Merrimack area he glimpsed scattered wreckage that he thinks might be promising. He, too, is going back for another look.

"I would love to find a recognizable piece of the Virginia."*****