BY CRAIG BRANDHORST
As South Carolina’s deputy state archaeologist for underwater, USC’s Chris Amer has helped discover, map and excavate more than a few shipwrecks over the years, including the Civil War submarine H.L. Hunley and a slew of other vessels along the East Coast and elsewhere. Now, Amer and his colleagues are in the news again following the recent discovery of a Civil War vessel in the muddy waters of the Pee Dee River.
The Confederate gunboat CSS Pee Dee, which Amer and State Archeologist Jonathan Leader discovered near Marion in November — 18 months after discovering two of the boat’s three enormous cannons at the bottom of the river — was one of 22 similar gunboats built at inland naval yards across the South.
“They’re building a huge new facility there,” Amer says. “There will be a whole exhibition about the Civil War, and specifically about the Mars Bluff Naval Yard and the shipwreck.”
As warships go, the CSS Pee Dee had a fairly humble military career — in fact, it never reached the open sea, as by the time of its completion the Union army had already captured Georgetown. It has nonetheless enjoyed a storied afterlife, marked by sightings, disruptions and attempts to salvage pieces of it for posterity and/or profit.
Launched at Mars Bluff in January of 1865, the 150-foot gunboat participated in exactly one skirmish three months later, about 40 miles upstream, near Cheraw. There, it provided cover for the Confederate troops of General William Hardee as they retreated from the advancing troops of General William T. Sherman. Subsequently, the gunboat was returned to Mars Bluff, where it was torched, possibly blown up and irretrievably sunk by its own crew so it would not be captured.
In the ensuing century-and-a-half, the river level periodically changed and the CSS Pee Dee reappeared several times. Amer says that an ensign in the U.S. Navy spotted the boat shortly after the Civil War, and in 1906 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pushed its wreckage onto a sandbar while dredging the river. Nearly two decades after that, the United Sons of the Confederacy managed to remove the boat’s propellers, which wound up on display at the Florence County Museum.
In 1954, however, much of what remained of the CSS Pee Dee was lost to history after a group of local businessmen also spotted the wreckage. Amer says the men brought in a bulldozer to make a road to the riverside then attempted to drag the boat ashore for display at a roadside attraction called Confederateland.
“Of course, this vessel had been burned and pushed ashore by the Corps of Engineers and possibly blown up, so it wasn’t very integral, and when they tried to pull it up it just broke into pieces,” Amer explains.
“So what they did is grab whatever they could — a 30-foot piece of the stern that was intact, a boiler and the two engines, the propeller shafts, anything else they could put their hands on. Then they put them on display across the highway and charged two bits for people to see them. Over time, things disintegrated, and that was that. I suspect the wood just dried up into powder. It was pretty much the end for those pieces.”
Somehow, the boiler did wind up for a time on display at South of the Border, but like everything else salvaged by the amateur archeologists, that, too, eventually disappeared.
“Who knows what happened to it,” Amer says, “but I suspect that the metal parts got sold for scrap.”
For all the folly, however, the 1954 salvage attempt was not a total bust, as it was witnessed by a 12-year-old boy named Michael Hartley — a boy who would eventually go on to become an archeologist himself. At the time, Hartley drew a sketch map, which he showed to Amer decades later. Amer credits that map with leading him to the site. Now, it’s just a matter of waiting for the river to subside this summer and finding the right contractor to hoist the 9,000-pound cannons from the water.
Of course, recovering the gunboat’s guns does not close the book on this particular excavation. Amer and Leader still want to locate the Mars Bluff Naval Yard, which at one time boasted at least 12 structures, plus a forge, slipways and a dry dock. Amer is certain they’re closing in on the site, even though efforts last summer by archeology students from East Carolina University failed to turn up any evidence.
“The students dug test holes all over the property where we thought [Mars Bluff] was, and they didn’t find one artifact related to the shipyard,” Amer says. “They found lots of Native American artifacts —there was a continuous occupation there for about 4,000 years — but nothing related to the shipyard. But we figure it’s got to be somewhere nearby.”
