USS Monitor gun turret: Ramping up to save a landmark artifact
May 4, 2016 | In the PressFrom Daily Press (http://www.dailypress.com/features/history/dp-nws-monitor-turret-20160504-story.html)
Conservators drained the historic USS Monitor gun turret for the first time in more than a year this week as they prepared the giant Civil War artifact for its first major conservation and archaeological campaign since 2011.
Buoyed by ramped-up fundraising efforts, the recently expanded conservation team at the USS Monitor Center is embarking on a two-month-long regimen aimed at removing the layers of marine concretion loosened from the turret's surface after five years of treatment in a mammoth 90,000-gallon tank.
They also will lift off a series of 20-inch-wide metal shields lining the turret's interior, then probe the sand and concretion lodged behind them for any small artifacts that might have been trapped when the pioneering ironclad warship sank during a Dec. 31, 1862, gale off Cape Hatteras, N.C.
"With most of them there's nothing left," says Senior Conservator William N. Hoffman, describing the shields that protected the crew from any metal fasteners blown off the turret's interior wall by the impact of enemy ordnance.
"But there are still four or five of them that are mostly intact — all on the starboard side of the turret where most of the artifacts have been found. So we believe there's a pretty good chance there are more of them waiting to be exposed."
Among the objects conservators discovered behind the shields during the 2011 cleaning campaign were a bone-handled knife, a monkey wrench, a glass tube for a steam engine gauge and a cartridge for a naval carbine.
They also turned up a silver table spoon engraved with the initials "SAL," marking the long-lost utensil as the property of the Monitor's hapless Third Assistant Engineer Samuel Augee Lewis, who went down with the ship after being stricken with sea sickness so badly during the storm that he could not rise from his bunk to escape.
"These are the kinds of artifacts that connect you to the stories of the Monitor's crew," Hoffman says, describing more than 760 objects found since the turret recovery and conservation project started in 2002.
"And when you think about how all these things were swirling around inside as the ship went down, it gives you a great indication of what it must have been like for them during the sinking. It was just chaos."
Wielding chisels, hammers and small pneumatic tools, the five-person conservation team will spend weeks removing the scalelike layers of concretion, with each day's work being interrupted several times to keep the vulnerable surface wet with purified water pumped through a sprinkler system.
Each Friday the treatment tank will be refilled in order to protect the turret over the weekend, Hoffman says, after which it will be drained again for the following week's work on Monday morning.
Once the cleaning and archaeological work have been completed, the turret's newly exposed interior and exterior walls will be scanned through a 3-D photogrammetry process in order to record the progress of the electrolytic reduction and descaling treatments.
The sensitive images also may enable the conservators to uncover hidden clues imprinted on the turret's exterior during the Monitor's milestone clash with the CSS Virginia in Hampton Roads in March 1862, as well as its confrontation with Confederate shore batteries at Drewry's Bluff on the James River two months later.
So discerning is the data gathered by the technique that it could provide the exact depth and circumference of both seen and unseen indentations made by enemy shot, bolts and shells, Hoffman says.
Those numbers, in turn, could lead to new insights about how and when each indentation took place during the Monitor's short career, including identifying the type of gun, amount of powder and kind of projectile that made them.
"Understanding these dents is crucial to understanding the Monitor's historic time in battle and the innovative ways that the Confederates tried to adjust to this brand-new kind of naval weapon," says Monitor Center Director John V. Quarstein, author of two books on the landmark vessels that met in the Battle of Hampton Roads.
"And once that concretion is removed, we'll be able to find out more about them than ever before."
Raising funds
The new conservation campaign is being funded by a yearlong effort that raised more than $1 million through grants, pledges, partnership agreements and cash contributions, including a $500,000 gift from descendants of Monitor Capt. John L. Worden and an annual $250,000 curatorial stipend from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which operates the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary.
Additional support is being sought through a series of private guided tours, which will bring donors into the center's sprawling conservation lab as well as the historic turret during times when the conservators are not working.
"Three years ago, we could not have made such a dramatic advance in the conservation of the turret. We didn't have the staff we have now. We didn't have the funding we needed," Quarstein says.
"But we've still raised only $1 million of the $20 million we need to complete the work."
