1876-The Fleet Mobilizes at Norfolk Navy Yard

This is a Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper engraving from February 1876, showing the North Atlantic Squadron deploying from the Norfolk Navy Yard for Winter exercises in Port Royal, South Carolina. Ships in the engraving include the historic steam sloop USS Hartford, the rebuilt steam sloop-of-war USS Marion, and the new iron-hulled steam gunboat USS Huron. There are two monitor-type warships and they are believed to be USS Passaic and Lehigh. In the written portion of the paper, the editors were more interested in the historic ships that the Navy laid up at the Yard, then the active ships. This included the sail frigates Savannah, St. Lawrence, and Macedonian. The colorized engraving is currently on display in the museum's 1907 exhibit.

The year Frank Leslie's produced this image was the lowest of low points in the history of the Navy. Even with the embarrassment of not being able to mobilize a squadron to respond to the Virginius incident in Cuba, Congress advised the Navy to cut its personnel by ten percent and continued to cut funding in new ship construction and technologies. It was also the year that Navy inspectors found several irregularities with the Navy Yard's contracts and the way it conduct business with the private sector.

Nonetheless, the Navy still had a job to do and Hampton Roads and Norfolk Naval Yard were the center of most of the Navy's activities in the Atlantic Ocean. Until the construction of NOB Hampton Roads, the Navy Yards served as ad hoc naval stations and all ships of the North Atlantic Squadron spent at least two months in the region, before heading out to a foreign station. The squadron of ships depicted in this image provide proof of this. En route to Port Royal, the Navy ordered most of the ships to skip Port Royal and steam to trouble spots in Haiti and Mexico.

Ship Model-1922 Boucher Company Model of USS Chicago

The following are images of the protected cruiser USS Chicago model currently on display in the museum's Steel Navy gallery. Chicago is most famous for being the "C" in the Navy's "ABCD" series of ships.  The "ABCD" ships brought about a rebirth in the US Fleet through the use of steel-hulled warships.

The New York-based Boucher Company manufactured the model around 1922.  Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt ordered ten duplicate sets of twelve ships (eleven ships and one aircraft) he felt were historically significant to the chronological development of the Navy (1776-ca. 1920). Chicago was one of the twelve subjects Roosevelt chose.

The FDR sets helped financially stabilize the Boucher Company in its start-up years. Since they had to make ten duplicates of each model, Boucher used mass-production techniques. When the 120 models were complete, Boucher continued selling the carved hulls and cast metal parts to the public.  This resulted in the birth of the model ship kit industry in the U.S.  Some of the fittings for the set are still being replicated and sold today.

The Navy initially classified Chicago as a "protected cruiser."  At the time, the Navy had three classifications for cruisers: "unprotected" (wooden ships), "protected" (thin layer of steel plating) and "armored" (heavier steel plating, specifically made to stop incoming shells). While Chicago and her sister "ABCD" ships were supposed to be the great leap forward for the U.S. Navy, one cannot help but notice that the model of Chicago looks like the Confederate cruiser CSS Florida. Both ships have a narrow hull and twin smoke stacks.  They used pivot-mounted guns (not turrets) and had masts for sails.

Unlike the Florida, the Chicago had a thin layer of unarmored steel plating over its wooden hull.  Chicago also has two screws when compared to Florida's one. Indeed, Chicago served as a transitory design between the wooden cruisers of the mid-nineteenth century and the fully loaded armored cruisers and battleships of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century.

Chicago had a quiet operational career. She never saw combat, but served invaluable duty as a training vessel. As one of the Navy's first steel hulled ships, officers and sailors like Alfred Thayer Mahan learned how to operate this new type of vessel while aboard her. She spent some of her time in Hampton Roads, most notably for the 1893 Naval Rendezvous.

USS Chicago in 1891-note the additional equipment the Navy added in comparison to the model.

USS Reuben James (DD-249) Painting

This is a water color of the Clemson-class destroyer USS Reuben James (DD-249) passing Fort Wool and out into the Chesapeake Bay and the open ocean. Prolific local maritime artist Casey Holtzinger painted this work and the museum acquired it in 1995. It currently hangs in the museum's Battle of the Atlantic gallery. The museum has several of Mr. Holtzinger's work, who specialized in painting Hampton Roads' civilian and military maritime legacy. Reuben James is most well known for being the first American warship sunk in action in World War II (weeks before the air raid on Pearl Harbor).

On October 31, 1941, Reuben James was part of the escort group guarding convoy HX-156. On the edge of area where British escorts were to meet to convoy and take it to England, U-552 spotted the ships. Her captain fired two torpedoes. Both weapons hit and cracked the destroyer in half. Of her 159 members of the ship's company, only forty-four survived. More about the incident and its effects of U.S.-German relations can be read here and here.