3 CSS Pee Dee cannons raised

Via Jonathan via Daily Timewaster

 

A team of archaeologists from the University of South Carolina have raised three Civil War cannons from the Pee Dee River in Mars Bluff, South Carolina. The cannons were the armament of the Confederate gunboat CSS Pee Dee which launched in January of 1865 and was deliberately scuttled by her crew just a month later when defeat seemed imminent. With the impending arrival of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army fresh from putting Columbia to the torch, the crew jettisoned the ship’s guns into the river, dismantled the boat, set it on fire and set it adrift down the river.

The three cannons are two Brooke rifles, a 6.4-inch and a 7-inch, and a 9-inch Dahlgren smoothbore which was originally a Union weapon. The cannon was salvaged from the wreck of the USS Southfield after it was sunk by the formidable Confederate ironclad ram CSS Albemarle during the Battle of Plymouth on the Roanoke River in Plymouth, North Carolina, on April 19th, 1864. The Albermarle had been commissioned literally two days earlier and would cut a deadly swath through the Union Navy........

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