NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) — Conservators have finished chiseling concreted sand and rust from the inside of the USS Monitor gun turret, which was salvaged from the Civil War shipwreck off Cape Hatteras, N.C., in August 2000.
This summer’s final stage of the five-year excavation at the Mariners Museum turned up more than a dozen unexpected artifacts — including silverware, bullets and gun-sight covers — hidden inside the last few inches of concretion.
It also revealed several previously unknown features of the historic turret, including brass fittings for the sight holes drilled through its thick armored walls.
“We’ve literally removed tons of sediment and concretion over the past few years. So, while we expected to make a few finds, we didn’t foresee anything like this,” museum conservator Dave Krop said Friday.
“The amount of new information we discovered was really astounding,” he said.
The 21.5-foot-wide turret is the hallmark feature of the Union ironclad, which made naval history when it clashed with the CSS Virginia — also known as the Merrimack — in the March 9, 1862, Battle of Hampton Roads.
Several excavation campaigns have resulted in the removal of tons of sediment and concretion as well as a set of human remains, hundreds of artifacts and the Monitor’s two cannons. The next step is subjecting the walls and roof of the upside-down turret to a long period of anti-corrosion treatment with a low-ampere electrical current.
“Ideally, you’d like to excavate something like this from start to finish,” Mr. Krop said. “But for a variety of conservation reasons we had to do it in stages.”
Among those reasons was the potentially dangerous structural state of the corroded iron roof, which had to be carefully reinforced, as well as the threat posed by the precariously perched 17,000-pound cannons before they were removed in late 2004.
Unlike most archaeological digs on land, this project required the time-consuming use of hammers and chisels.
“You have to hammer through everything to get at the artifacts. It’s very slow and tedious — and sometimes even painful,” said Tiffany James, a Monitor National Marine Sanctuary intern who worked inside the turret this summer and last year. “But it’s really great when you finally get them out and you get to touch something that no one has held in their hands for 145 years.”
Often stooped over on her hands and knees, Miss James chiseled away at the rocklike substance for hours, recovering such artifacts as a mechanic’s hammer, two gun-sight covers, a hog’s hair brush, a small silver spoon and a long steel file.
She also exposed numerous previously unseen features of the turret, including two sight holes and their meticulously crafted brass covers.
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