The Coast Division and Burnside's Expedition

By Julius Lacano
Hampton Roads Naval Museum Educator

Although Confederate-held Norfolk, Virginia, was well protected by batteries at Sewells Point and other strategic locations  along the Elizabeth River early in the Civil War, Forts Monroe and Calhoun (changed to Wool in 1862) remained under Washington's control, and a Union blockade prevented the city from resupply from the sea.  Trade with Norfolk came not through Hampton Roads but through the North Carolina sounds, until an audacious operation to take Roanoke Island, seen here, began on February 7, 1862. (North Carolina Collection, UNC Chapel Hill)     

On May 10, 1862, a column of 6000 Union men led by 78-year-old Major General John Wool landed on Willoughby Spit and made their way to Norfolk. Upon arrival, the soldiers were met by Mayor William Lamb, who surrendered the city without resistance. But what led to this symbolic and military victory? Much of the credit can be given to operations south of the city earlier that year.   

A contemporary map by D.S. Walton showing Hampton
 Roads to the north, the North Carolina sounds to the south,
and the strategic location of Roanoke Island near the mouth
of Albemarle Sound. (University of North Carolina Libraries)

At the beginning of 1862, the Union presence in Hampton Roads was limited to Fortress Monroe in what is now Hampton, and Fort Wool, an island in the channel between Hampton and Norfolk that bristled with artillery. The fortification was formerly named after the noted secessionist and former Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, but the war had brought about a change of name. South of these two positions lay Confederate-held Norfolk and the Gosport Navy Yard, where the steam frigate USS Merrimack was transformed into the mighty ironclad CSS Virginia. Norfolk, though cut off from supplies via sea by the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, was well supplied from the south through the numerous inlets, sounds, and bays that lined the North Carolina coast by way of the Dismal Swamp and the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canals.

Matthew Brady's portrait of Ambrose Burnside (Library of Congress)

The cornerstones of defense for this area were Roanoke Island and its batteries manned by 3000 Confederate troops, and the “Mosquito Fleet,” gunboats crewed by experienced waterman, that patrolled the waters of the Outer Banks. In order to cut off the flow of supplies to Norfolk, these two issues had to be dealt with by Union forces. That responsibility would fall to two men, Brigadier General Ambrose Burnside, a West Pointer and Mexican-American War veteran with distinctive facial hair, and Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsborough, the Commander of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron. Burnside’s idea was to raise a “Coast Division” made up of New England sailors, dockworkers, fisherman and lobsterman, whom he reasoned, due to their previous work experience and familiarity with ships, would be better equipped to make amphibious assaults. By January, successful recruiting efforts led to a force of 13,000 trained men ready for the planned invasion.


A contemporary War Department map
of the route taken by Burnside's Expedition.
 (University of North Carolina Libraries)

The job of the US Navy would be to silence the artillery batteries on Roanoke Island and then take control of the waters of the Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds. To accomplish this task, Flag Officer Goldsborough assembled 20 vessels, as well as several hastily constructed floating batteries, mounting 108 guns in total. The ships and floating batteries would first concentrate their fire on the Confederate artillery on the western side of Roanoke Island and then support the attack by the Union Army. Once Roanoke Island was captured, the ships were to be dispatched to find and destroy all Confederate vessels in the area.

On January 5, 1862, the men of the Coast Division began to embark on the transports that would take them from Annapolis, Maryland, to a secret location in the South. By January 9, the men and their equipment were loaded and the ships began to get underway to rendezvous with the US Navy units waiting at Fortress Monroe. Two days later, the assembled fleet left the protected waters around the fort and headed out into the open sea. Even at this point, only Burnside and his staff knew their precise destination. In a short time, however, the captains would be requested to open the sealed orders they had been given to inform them that they all were headed to the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

A contemporary War Department map from the campaign. (University of North Carolina Libraries)

After a rough and stormy southbound transit and a time consuming and difficult crossing of the shoal water around Cape Hatteras, the fleet assembled in Pamilco Sound, south of Roanoke Island, with a planned start of operations occurring the next day, February 6. Due to stormy weather, operations did not start till the 7th when the Union gunboats took up positions to attack the Confederates, and the Union Army landed troops to engage the Confederate Army the next day. Only four of the Confederate cannons could engage the Union fleet. While the Confederate artillery proved less than useful, the ships of the Mosquito fleet proved their worth by hitting and lightly damaging several Union ships with no losses of their own. They eventually had to leave the battle due to running out of ammunition.

The Battle of Roanoke Island. (Colliers Weekly Archives)

The next day, February 8, would be the culmination of the effort when Union troops routed the Confederates and took control of Roanoke Island. While the Confederates were defeated on land, the mission of the US Navy was not yet complete, the ships of the “Mosquito Fleet” still proved a threat and their destruction or capture was now paramount.

Ffity Years Ago: A Rough Road Leads to the Stars

 I guess when a fellow climbs into a spacecraft, straps himself in, and starts waiting for the countdown, he could give what’s coming some really serious consideration, but I’m not afraid.

Lt. Roger Chaffee, USN, 1964

This illustration depicts a fully fueled Saturn 1B about to take flight, containing over a million pounds of kerosene, liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, yet the fire that took the lives of the Apollo I crew 50 years ago this week occurred during a test conducted upon a seemingly less-dangerous defueled rocket.  (The Saturn V Collection, M.Louis Salmon Library, University of Alabama, Huntsville, via heroicrelics)

If we die, we want people to accept it.
We are in a risky business and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program.
The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.

Lt. Col. Virgil "Gus" Grissom, USAF, 1966

Recently the world said goodbye to the last man to walk on the moon, retired Navy Captain Eugene Cernan, whose mission during Apollo 17 became a swan song of sorts for the American manned moon exploration program that remains unequaled by any other nation. Fifty years ago this week, America lost one of Cernan’s best friends in the astronaut program, Lieutenant Commander Roger Chaffee, along with two other men who were on track to be the first to reach the Moon.

The tragic accident that claimed their lives and stunned the nation did not occur on the way to the moon, nor even in the sky.  It occurred only 218 feet above the ground, within a command module situated atop a Saturn 1B rocket at Launch Complex 34, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Although known today as Apollo I, the orbital mission was officially designated Apollo 204, and the command module itself was known simply as Spacecraft 012.

  

During a NASA press conference on March 21, 1966, announcing their selection as the crew of Apollo I, Lieutenant (later Lieutenant Commander) Roger Chaffee, pilot for Apollo I, appears with senior pilot Edward White II and mission commander Virgil "Gus" Grissom. Both Chafee and Grissom were Air Force lieutenant colonels. (National Aeronautics and Space Administration via Wikimedia Commons) 

The effort to become the first nation to reach the moon did not come without sacrifice. From engineers and physicists to the mathematical specialists known as “computers,” people from all walks of life, quite a few of them working in Hampton Roads, made the sacrifices necessary to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s May 1961 pledge to send a man to the Moon and ensure his safe return before 1970. Arguably the most elite members of that effort were the astronauts themselves.  They endured the greatest scrutiny and undertook the greatest risks. Of the three of them who paid the ultimate price on January 27, 1967, Lt. Cmdr. Roger Chaffee was the least-senior. In fact, he was one of the youngest applicants ever accepted into the program. 

USS Wisconsin (BB-64) in 1955. (Hampton Roads Naval Museum file)

Born on February 15, 1935, a flight his father sent him on in 1942 changed the course of Chaffee’s life. From then on he became intensely focused on aviation. Although he declined an appointment at Annapolis after graduating high school, the young Eagle Scout found his way into the Navy as a member of the NROTC at Purdue University, where future NASA Navy alum Gene Cernan had enrolled the year before. Before beginning his studies at Purdue in 1954, Chaffee completed an eight-week training cruise aboard USS Wisconsin (BB-64) during which he made port calls in England, Scotland, France, and Cuba. The following summer he visited Sweden and Denmark aboard the destroyer Perry (DD-844).

Before graduating from Purdue in 1957, Chaffee managed to earn his private license in less than two months. Commissioned an ensign on August 22, 1957, Chaffee began his active duty Navy career temporarily assigned to Naval Station Norfolk before reporting for Navy flight training in Pensacola, Florida, that November.


Considered by many as an excellent photographic mapping aircraft but not the necessarily the safest platform for collecting tactical air reconnaissance, the Douglas RA-3 Skywarrior, known as the "whale" to many plane captains around the fleet, was one of the largest aircraft ever to be used routinely aboard aircraft carriers.  (Department of Defense via cybermodeler)

After earning his aviator’s wings in early 1959, Chaffee completed a number of challenging assignments. Perhaps his most challenging was as a RA-3B Skywarrior pilot attached to Heavy Photographic Squadron 62 (VAP-62), based at NAS Jacksonville, Florida. Although assigned as the squadron's safety and QC officer, Chaffee’s performance proved so impressive that he became one of the youngest naval aviators to fly the lumbering plane many called the "whale." Originally designed as a carrier-based strategic bomber, the Skywarrior was derisively known as the ‘flying coffin” around the Navy’s photo reconnaissance community, yet Chaffee fearlessly flew over Cuba on mission after mission in 1961 during the early stages of the Cuban Missile Crisis, earning an Air Medal.

In October 1962, Chaffee became one of only 14 pilots selected for the astronaut program from 1,800 applicants. Assigned to the Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston, he moved in next door to Cernan, another of the picks for the latest astronaut cohort, after moving to Houston.  Although they had not gotten to know each other while at Purdue, they became fast friends.

"Roger and I bonded," Cernan recalled over three decades later. "We shared a dream. We were, in a special way, brothers... from the day we reported to NASA, our space careers grew in parallel paths."

At his station in mission control in Houston, Texas, Roger Chaffee monitors communications with Gemini 3 in March 1965. (NASA via Wikimedia Commons) 

The next couple of years for Chaffee would be a blur of almost ceaseless training, from mastering survival techniques in the scorching Nevada desert to the sweltering Panamanian jungle.  He would also study every aspect of the Apollo spacecraft, even going to the production facilities to carefully watch the spacecraft components being assembled, and building an intimate knowledge of these unprecedented vehicles. Rounding out his experience as a junior astronaut, Chaffee would function as CapCom, or capsule communicator, for two Gemini flights under Lt. Cmdr. Cernan and the chief CapCom, Air Force Lt. Col. Gus Grissom, one of the original Mercury program astronauts. Grissom would also be chosen as mission commander for Apollo I, an orbital flight designed to demonstrate the spaceworthiness of the command and service module designs for a future mission to the moon. As Pilot for Apollo I, one of Chaffee's key tasks would be to maintain communications between the command module and mission control.

At 7:55 am on January 27, 1967, a plugs out test began, which meant that Spacecraft 012 was disconnected from its launch gantry umbilicals which typically provide power and communications before a launch.  It would be functioning in a simulation of its own onboard fuel cell power system, which it would rely upon from the final launch countdown until splashdown.  The rocket itself had no fuel aboard. The astronauts entered the capsule at 1:00 pm. By 6:20, a series of lingering communications system problems were ironed out and the spacecraft was transferred to simulated fuel cell systems for the test.

The fire began approximately 6:31 pm, and it was noticed less than ten seconds later. After the fire began, the design of the command module made opening the hatch extremely difficult. In launch configuration, there were actually three separate hatches, one atop another, to protect the spacecraft during the ascent and shield the astronauts from the vacuum of space. They now served to hold the astronauts in what quickly turned into a lethal pressure cooker. Despite the fact that technicians were just outside the command module in the adjoining White Room, which was connected to the gantry, even the 90 seconds it would supposedly take to open the hatches in an emergency were not near enough to save their lives.

In less than a minute, the oxygen-saturated interior of the Apollo I command module (Spacecraft 012) became an inferno. (NASA)

Their spacesuits afforded some protection from the conflagration, but as the interior cabin pressure shot up to 35 psi from the 16.5 maintained within the vehicle (from the average 14.7 at sea level) and 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, even the coolant coursing through the bursting aluminum piping within the spacecraft fed the flames. It only took about 15 seconds for the fire to raise and burst the pressure vessel, causing the fire to spread even to the adjoining White Room and drive back the rescuers. All the while Chafee remained at his post, still attempting to keep the communication lines with ground controllers open.  That is how he was found when technicians finally gained access to the command module at 6:37, only five and a half minutes since Chaffee had first reported the fire.

The root cause of the fire was never precisely determined, yet the spark of ignition has long been assumed to have been between two electrical cables near the environmental control unit of the Command Module, and the nearly 5,000 square inches of Velcro within the cabin provided ready kindling. Changes implemented in the wake of the accident included the incorporation of more flame-resistant materials within the crew cabin as well as the spacesuits. The hatch was redesigned to open during an emergency in 30 seconds. A mixed nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere would be used in the ground phase of future Apollo flights as well.    

Although a similar type of electrical/oxygen fire occurred in 1970 within the service module of Apollo 13, this time 200,000 miles out in space, which almost cost the lives of three more astronauts, no other Apollo program astronauts were lost on a mission.  The program ended on a high note when the hand of friendship was extended in April 1975 through a docking adapter between an Apollo and a Soyuz spacecraft, which remains the mainstay of the Russian program today.  Nevertheless, both programs were born in tragedy. Less than three months after the Apollo I accident in 1967, Soyuz I successfully made it into space, but every flight and recovery system, including the main and backup parachutes, failed aboard the spacecraft, sending veteran cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov into the southern Ural mountains at nearly 400 miles an hour. 

Dr. Werner Von Braun, one of the chief architects of the American space program, dourly mused after being told of the Apollo I accident, “Their deaths brought to mind the Roman saying ‘per aspera ad astra’ ­– a rough road leads to the stars.”

Spacecraft 012 remains in storage at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Its hatches, however, are to be put on display at Kennedy Space Center within the coming week.   

Lord Dunmore's Navy in Hampton Roads, 1775-1776, Part II: The Road to Great Bridge

By Matthew Krogh
Contributing Writer

Editor's Note:  This is the second in a series about Virginia's last royal governor, John Murray, Fourth Earl of Dunmore, who tried to establish a base of operations in Hampton Roads in an attempt to retain power during the early months of the Revolutionary War.  
 

Reenactors portraying British forces peer out from the palisades of "Fort Murray," Lord Dunmore's redoubt south of Norfolk, Virginia, during recent commemorations of the Battle of Great Bridge. (Photograph by M.C. Farrington) 

Lord Dunmore’s defeat at Hampton in October 1775 gnawed not only at his honor, but his ego. Prior to the battle, he attempted to ensure media silence by raiding Norfolk. On September 30, he sent a party of marines and sailors to seize the printing press of the Norfolk Intelligencer. Dunmore had accused publisher John Holt of sedition “by the grossest misrepresentation of facts both public and private.” The British made off with a bookbinder and a journeyman and gave three cheers as they marched down to the wharf. This aggression angered the citizens of Norfolk, who sent Dunmore a letter calling his actions “illegal and riotous.” Dunmore responded in a letter to Norfolk saying that he only wished the “unhappy deluded Publick might no longer remain in the Dark concerning the present contest.” Certainly, if the Virginia press was the dark, then Dunmore was the light. Yet, his conciliatory agenda could not penetrate the ridicule and disdain the Virginia Gazette heaped upon Lord Dunmore after the loss at Hampton.

"Part of the Province of Virginia," a map thought to have been made in 1791, is oriented south side up and shows two key areas of Dunmore's campaign in the Norfolk area, particularly Kemp's Landing (center right) and Great Bridge (upper right). (Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Dunmore’s force now consisted of the Otter (20 guns and 170 men), Mercury (20 guns and 170 men), William (14 guns), Eilbeck (unarmed), four schooners, three sloops, and three pilot boats (four guns each). However, the British were not so cavalier in their raid in Princess Anne County on November 15. Dunmore’s ships landed over 100 men, who marched several miles to Kemp’s Landing and scattered the Princess Anne militia like chaff in the wind, raised the British colors (a naval jack), and seized supplies. Dunmore appeared in person this time and gave a rousing speech, entreating civilians to return their allegiance to the crown. Then in traditional English fashion, he held a celebratory ball, sure that he had cowed locals into submission.

Clearly, Lord Dunmore had not given up on Virginia. Yet, he was worried that locals no longer feared him. Therefore, he “determined to run all risques [sic] for their support” and issued a proclamation he had written aboard the HMS William on November 7. In it, he acknowledged a state of rebellion, declared martial law, and stated, “And I do hereby farther declare all indented [indentured] Servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to Rebels) free, that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining his Majesty’s Troops.” Perhaps this was an olive branch from Dunmore to the rustics who chafed under the rule of Virginia’s gentry. However, most Virginians sensed an attack on their social hierarchy and therefore received Dunmore’s Proclamation with a mixture of anger and dread.

Reenactors (the 76th, 64th and 14th Regiments of Foote in this case) portraying British regulars under the command of Lord Dunmore confidently cross "Great Bridge" against Virginia and North Carolina militiamen. (Photograph by M.C. Farrington) 

The next day, November 16, Lord Dunmore returned to Norfolk to raise his colors and coerce more citizens into taking the oath of allegiance. Red cloth, the sign of loyalty to the crown, quickly became scarce in tory-populated Norfolk as many flocked to his banner.  Of course for some it was more a matter of convenience than ardor.  From here, Dunmore continued his psychological warfare. Using the stolen printing press, he printed his own gazette aboard the William on November 25. The first issue boasted that there were “3000 men determined to defend this part of the country against the inroads of the enemies to our King.” For the duration of November, Dunmore sent the Kingfisher up the James River to control river crossings. He also pulled all of his troops out of Portsmouth, instead concentrating them in Norfolk, preparing for a final coup de grâce.  He must have imagined that the victory would rival the Battle of Point Pleasant, near the Ohio River, where he had defeated Shawnee Indians under Chief Cornstalk in 1774. There he had forced the defeated Shawnee to sign a peace treaty conceding all of Kentucky and Virginia south of the Ohio River. Perhaps he had something similar in mind for the rebellious Virginians.

How a President's About-Face Would Help Net the World's Largest Navy Base

Local History. World Events.

This phrase has been a part of the Hampton Roads Naval Museum brand for many years, emphasizing that what happens here is connected with historical events, big and small, all around the world.

In June 1914, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, and President Woodrow Wilson attend a ceremony at the State Department.  After Bryan decided against running for the presidency in 1912, Daniels, a North Carolina publisher, put his support behind Wilson, who appointed both men into his cabinet.  Daniels would play a key role in expanding and modernizing the Navy before World War I, and in procuring the former Jamestown Exposition Grounds for a naval operating base and training station after war was declared.  (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library via Wikimedia Commons)

For example, thousands of Sailors from the Great White Fleet, which left Hampton Roads in 1907, were spending the second week of January 1909 performing disaster relief operations in Messina, Sicily, after earthquakes and tsunamis killed up to 200,000, including the American consul and his wife.

From disaster relief to myriad Navy-led diplomatic initiatives around the world, Hampton Roads-based ships and Sailors have affected the destinies of nations near and far. But of course no naval operation is as consequential as those conducted to win wars, which is still a core mission of the United States Navy.

World events have also affected Hampton Roads in profound ways, but again none more dramatically than those connected to war.  Although half a world away, seemingly disconnected from the daily lives of those living in Tidewater Virginia, the events of World War I, which by January 1917 had been raging in Europe for nearly two and a half years, would culminate in the establishment of the world’s largest naval base, right here in Hampton Roads.   

Theodore Wool. (Hampton Roads Naval Museum file)

Norfolk-based lawyer Theodore Wool had been campaigning for such a base in Sewells Point, north of the city, ever since the Jamestown Exposition had closed in November 1907.  The exposition had attracted nearly a million visitors to the area from around the world, yet the massive investment had not yielded the financial windfall investors had hoped, and the Jamestown Exposition Company ultimately went bankrupt. Wool and a number of other investors had bought the 474-acre property from the company and almost immediately began lobbying for its purchase by the federal government.  An attempt to move an appropriations bill for the property through the Senate in 1908 foundered, yet Wool soldiered on, taking up residence in one of the state houses built on the exposition property as the effort continued.  

The cover of a rare copy of Wool's pamphlet, Reasons. (HRNM Collection)

In January 1917, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels received Wool and a group of prominent Virginia politicians in Washington to discuss the acquisition of the exposition property.  Wool had probably brought a self-published pamphlet with him, entitled Reasons. Within it he argued, among other things, that Sewells Point's size, location, and existing infrastructure made it a natural choice for a new naval base.  Whether the pamphlet made an impact on Daniels is unclear, but what seems more certain is that a decision made that month in Berlin, not Washington, would ultimately become more decisive in convincing Secretary Daniels and President Woodrow Wilson that the existing infrastructure the Navy possessed in Hampton Roads was insufficient to meet the needs of a nation in a global war.   

The aversion to becoming directly involved in foreign conflicts was a key doctrine in early American foreign policy.  "Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation," said President George Washington in his farewell address. "Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns." Presidents from Thomas Jefferson to John Quincy Adams echoed this policy, with Adams declaring that America "goes not abroad, searching for monsters to destroy.”  Woodrow Wilson had begun his presidency nearly a century later with much the same stance towards Europe.  He had been primarily focused upon domestic matters during his first term, and had run for his second term upon an antiwar platform, urging Americans to stay “neutral in fact as well as in name.” One of his key reelection campaign slogans in 1916 was, “He Kept Us Out of War.”  That he was reelected on this platform just a few short months after one of the most destructive attacks ever made by agents of a foreign government on American soil says much about the national mood. 
  
German saboteurs had set explosives at the Black Tom Island munitions depot in northern New Jersey on the morning of July 30, 1916.  The titanic detonation of over 100,000 pounds of TNT and other Britain-bound munitions killed only a handful of people but caused $20 million in damage (estimated at nearly half a billion in today’s dollars), including $100,000 in damage to the Statue of Liberty, caused the evacuation of Ellis Island, and broke windows up to 25 miles away.  The Black Tom explosion was only the most infamous of over 50 attacks conducted under the auspices of a unit of the German army intelligence’s Sektion Politik, operating from cells in New York, New Orleans, and Baltimore, including fires and other damage to at least 37 ships. We now know that the tendrils of of this network also reached into Hampton Roads, and its members confessed to setting fires in Newport News and Norfolk.  Some cell members even staged anthrax attacks upon animals being sent to Europe, the first such biological attacks conducted in America.

Although Wool and his compatriots returned to Norfolk empty-handed, the German high command was to hand Wilson his greatest single reason to change his entire approach to the war in Europe before the month was out.  On January 31, 1917, Count Johann von Bernstorff, the German ambassador in Washington, told Secretary of State Robert Lansing that the pledge his government made the previous May to respect international law with regards to submarine operations was ending.  Starting the following day, any ship, under any flag, within the German-designated "war zone" around Great Britain could be attacked without warning.

The German General Staff had conceived of this shift because they believed that they were within months of choking off the British from vital war material and forcing a negotiated end to the war, on their terms. Their reading of the situation with the British was not altogether inaccurate, but they failed to anticipate the American response to such a move. By resuming unrestricted submarine warfare they were in effect throwing down a gauntlet before Wilson and setting the stage for America's entry into the war. The nation’s credibility rested upon its ability to win that war. America’s Navy would play a crucial role in delivering a war-winning response to the Germans, and procuring the land that would ultimately become the world’s largest naval base would in turn become a crucial part of that effort.

Remembering the Battle of Hampton Roads-- With Cats!

By Joseph Miechle
Hampton Roads Naval Museum Educator

In this composite, one of the thousands of cats created by Ruth and Rebecca Brown of Civil War Tails handles a line aboard the Hampton Roads Naval Museum's model of USS Monitor. (Photo Illustration by M.C. Farrington)

A couple of years ago, The Daybook (Volume 18, Issue 2) contained an article about how the Battle of Hampton Roads was remembered in vastly different ways by Civil War veterans and the public. Here we are, nearly 155 years after the battle, and yet how we remember the battle continues to evolve. In a way, the way we display the battle reflects how our modern culture continues to change. With this in mind, we present a most unusual, yet highly entertaining and informative museum in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which was recently labeled "[P]ossibly America's most whimsical war museum," by the Washington Post.

The ironclad Monitor fires a round against CSS Virginia within the Battle of Hampton Roads diorama within the Civil War Tails museum in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  (Courtesy Civil War Tails)

Gettysburg is not generally considered a must-see destination for students of American naval history, but a recent National Public Radio story piqued our interest when it showcased Civil War Tails at the Homestead Diorama Museum. The museum’s hand crafted dioramas depict some of the American Civil War’s most important moments: Fort Sumter in 1861; The Angle and Little Round Top at Gettysburg in 1863; the USS Housatonic; and Andersonville Prison. They also feature the 1862 Battle of Hampton Roads. While the displays are certainly what some would consider a folk art creation, they still reflect the large amount of research that went into their creation. Meticulous craftsmanship has gone into representing actual people, topography, and hardware. Only upon closer examination do you realize the displays contain no people, but over 2,000 anthropomorphic cats.

Inside the Monitor turret we find nearly two dozen hand-made Union Navy felines, showing the cramped working conditions during the battle. (Photograph by Joseph Miechle)

The Civil War Tails Museum is the creation of Rebecca Brown and her sister Ruth. Their study of the Civil War merged with their love of cats, and the modeling of clay figures that they had been doing from the age of 11. By 2015, it had culminated in the opening of their museum. They use cats as opposed to people because, according to their web site, “Cats are easier to make and after all, history doesn’t have to be boring." It seems oddly appropriate that our modern society's fascination with online cat videos only naturally embraces a venue that merges people's fascination of the Civil War with cats.

John L. Worden and his junior officers prior to getting underway. Can you guess which one is Lt. Worden? (Courtesy Civil War Tails)

While the museum certainly displays levity with the use of cats, they also capture some otherwise underappreciated stories of the actions they depict. The diorama of the Battle of Hampton Roads is an excellent example. While the cardboard ships contain clay cats they also very accurately tell the story of the battle. The top of USS Monitor's turret can be removed and packed inside the detailed homemade model are 19 soot-covered cats representing Lt. Greene and the actual gun crews during the battle.

This image shows injured crew members sprawled across the floor of CSS Virginia after taking a point blank shot from USS Monitor (Photograph by Joseph Miechle)

The side of CSS Virginia may be removed, and the inside contains the gun crews commanded by Lt. John Wood and goes so far as to accurately depict his crew “bleeding from the nose or ears,” as Wood himself described it, after being struck by close range shots from USS Monitor. The diorama also has the benefit of “portholes” drilled into the sides below the waterline, so that a visitor might see the dramatic difference in draft between the two ships. The author is of the opinion that, despite lacking the refined details of what most consider “museum quality” models, the diorama at Civil War Tails makes up for in character and storytelling. The museum has made accessible a pivotal moment of American history to audiences who may never have been inclined to learn about it, thus adding to the legacy of how we “remember” the Battle of Hampton Roads.

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