On 9 March 2007, the 145th anniversary of the momentous first clash of armored warships, the Mariners’ Museum and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary opened the doors of the USS Monitor Center in Newport News, Virginia. The modern exhibition and conservation facility located at the museum is the principal repository for artifacts recovered from the Monitor’s wreck site and tells both the historical and continuing story of the celebrated “cheesebox on a raft.” The Mariners’ Museum also works with other institutions to place Monitor artifacts on display around the nation.
At the heart of the USS Monitor Center’s 20,000-square-foot exhibition, titled Ironclad Revolution, are many of the 1,600 artifacts recovered so far from NOAA’s Monitor sanctuary, 16 miles off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Numerous artifacts are beautiful in their own right, but paired with historical documents and other archival material from the museum’s library and archives housed at nearby Christopher Newport University, they help us better understand the people who used them and the events surrounding them. An elegant brass gimbal displayed with its fragile lantern pieces shows the beauty and elegance of the interior of the Victorian-era ironclad, while her massive XI-inch Dahlgren guns remind visitors that this ship was meant for brutal war. Accompanying images from a March 1862 Harper’s Weekly as well as letters home from the crewmen describing the ship’s interiors help paint a vivid picture for visitors.
Also helping the artifacts tell their stories is a wide array of multimedia films, computer interactives, and a full-scale external replica of the Monitor built by the Apprentice School of Newport News Shipbuilding (formerly Northrop Grumman Newport News). Immersive exhibits allow visitors to enter the gun deck of an early 19th-century frigate, walk inside the casemate of the Confederate ironclad Virginia, visit the Monitor’s wardroom, and stand inside a re-creation of the Union ship’s iconic gun turret.
Using computer games, Monitor Center visitors can sail a wooden frigate into battle, watch the frigate Merrimack morph into the Virginia, and, most popular of all, design their own virtual ironclad for review by a skeptical, animated Ironclad Board of the U.S. Navy. Large-format touch screens throughout the galleries introduce visitors to men and women who have played important roles in the Monitor’s past, present, and future.
Three major multimedia installations punctuate the gallery experience. In the first, visitors find themselves immersed in a gale off Cape Hatteras on 31 December 1862, watching helplessly as the Monitor’s red signal lantern disappears beneath the waves. They can feel a part of battle action in the 360-degree theater experience of Ironclad Glory, a digital tour-de-force that re-creates both 8 and 9 March 1862 through exquisite digital paintings and a soul-stirring original score. Finally, they can agonize alongside the men and women of NOAA and the U.S. Navy as they work together to raise the Monitor’s turret in an interactive theater experience hosted by Law and Order star Sam Waterston.
But the true stars of the show are the conservators and the artifacts on which they are working. The relics range from the Monitor’s turret, guns, steam engine, and condenser resting in their huge conservation tanks to the tiny buttons, bottles, boots, and coat pieces that speak to the daily lives of the men from 1862 who dubbed themselves “the Monitor Boys.” The artifacts undergoing conservation—and occasionally, the conservators themselves—are on public view at all times, accessed by on-site visitors by means of a viewing platform or seen by virtual visitors through webcams permanently trained on the active areas of the Batten Conservation Complex. At different times of the year, visitors might be treated to a view into the drained tanks as museum conservators and NOAA archaeologists work on removing marine concretions from the artifacts. Periodically, conservators open up the labs for an even closer view.
Over the summer of 2011, the Monitor’s gun turret, which still rests upside-down in its 90,000-gallon tank of deionized water, was the star attraction, as the tank remained drained for several weeks for conservation activities. Though most of the active archaeological work on the turret was completed several years ago, the structure still clung to a few secrets. Discoveries in 2011 included the remains of a wrench, an unfired rifle cartridge, and a series of Roman numerals stamped into the turret’s armor plates. The numerals may have been used as assembly guides for the crews at Continental Ironworks in the Greenpoint area of Brooklyn, New York, who received the turret plates from Abbott & Sons in Baltimore in early 1862.
Most poignant of all the 2011 turret discoveries is a decorative spoon engraved with Third Assistant Engineer Samuel Augee (or Auge) Lewis’ initials. A young officer from Baltimore, Lewis had joined the Monitor in November 1862 as a replacement. He was one of 16 men who went down with the ship on New Year’s Eve 1862. The spoon is one of three pieces of silverware bearing the initials SAL that have been recovered to date. Other pieces of silverware recovered from the turret in years past bear the initials JN and NKA and the name G. Frederickson. Seaman Jacob Nicklis, Acting Ensign Norman Knox Atwater, and Acting Ensign George Frederickson also perished with Lewis.
In 2002 NOAA archaeologists recovered two sets of human remains from the Monitor’s turret. Since that time, the Mariners’ Museum has been working closely with NOAA to provide archival support in an effort to identify the remains of these two sailors with the ultimate goal of petitioning the U.S. Navy to bury them at Arlington National Cemetery in December 2012.
Conservators also fully deconcreted the Monitor’s steam engine in 2011; it now rests on a new support structure that will allow conservators better access to the artifact along with better visitor viewing. Not to be outdone by the turret, the steam engine’s components were also holding some secrets. In the late summer of 2011, conservator Will Hoffman received a surprise when a golden-colored officer’s button popped quite unexpectedly from the Monitor’s engine throttle. So far it is the first officer’s button recovered since the ironclad was discovered in 1973. There may be more surprises in store as conservators begin the monumental task of disassembling the engine for conservation treatment.
Shortly after the loss of the Monitor, the vessel’s surgeon, Grenville Weeks, wrote an account of the sinking for March 1863 issue of Atlantic Monthly. The article provides not only the most fitting epitaph for the iconic ironclad, but the unofficial mission statement for the USS Monitor Center. Weeks recalled that within two days of the sinking the surviving officers and crew were back at Fort Monroe, and the unreality of what they had been through set in, with the week “seeming . . . like some wild dream.” He continued:
One thing only appeared real: our little vessel was lost, and we, who, in months gone by, had learned to love her, felt a strange pang go through us as we remembered that never more might we tread her deck, or gather in her little cabin at evening.
We had left her behind us, one more treasure added to the priceless store, which Ocean so jealously hides. The Cumberland and Congress went first; the little boat that avenged their loss has followed; in both noble souls have gone down. Their names are for history; and so long as we remain a people, so long will the work of the Monitor be remembered, and her story told to our children’s children.
The Monitor’s story continues after 150 years and is unfolding each day in the conservation labs and archives at the Mariners’ Museum.