Turret tours Q&A: Visitors next week can touch shot damage to famed USS Monitor, examine marvel of engineering

Turret after previous draining (Courtesy of The Mariners' Museum and Park)

The turret of the ironclad USS Monitor is drained for only a short time each year to allow access for conservation work. John Quarstein, an author, historian and director of the USS Monitor Center at the Mariners’ Museum and Park in Newport News, Va., this week has been meeting visitors at the platform overlooking the turret to explain the current work. He will be giving tours of the giant artifact on Aug. 8-11. The Picket asked him about that presentation. (A reservation is required and a $100 donation toward the center’s work is requested).

Q. What will you be conveying to the audience next week?

John Quarstein

A. Basically, we interface with a few portions of the “Ironclad Revolution” exhibit and then enter the Batten Conservation wet lab to enter the turret tank. We will walk around the turret and touch shot damage, etc. It is truly an awesome experience. Then we will go up into the dry lab, where we will handle items found inside the turret. I will be telling stories about the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia relating to the artifacts and other aspects of the “Ironclad Revolution” exhibit.

Q. What about the turret interests you the most -- Is it the artifact itself? Or its story? How do you relate that to people?

A. I find the turret fascinating for a multitude of reasons ....the shot dents are all awesome, especially one from a 7-inch Brooke bolt that hit the USS Monitor during the 15 May 1862 (Battle of Drewry’s Bluff). The bolt screwed into the layers of iron plate protecting the turret. I am thrilled every time that I stand in the turret because of those who tested the Monitor during the 9 March 1862 battle with the CSS Virginia. The turret is a major part of the sinking story and is all about survivors and those who were lost at sea. Everyone had to pass through the turret to seek safety.

Sections of conserved coat. (The Mariners' Museum and Park)

Q. When you show off the items found in the turret, which generally are of the most interest to visitors?

A. I think the pilot's coat found in the turret is the most unusual item. It has been conserved and is now on exhibit. I have a piece of Monitor coal on my desk in the USS Monitor Center which I … reflect about. 

USS Monitor: Maker's mark uncovered in turret believed to be from iron foundry in Hudson Valley

(Photos courtesy of Mariners' Museum and Park)

A discovery in the turret of the famed Civil War ironclad USS Monitor has brought to light the story of an iron mill that for decades was the industrial heartbeat of a Hudson Valley town.

The Mariners’ Museum and Park in Newport News, Va., announced this week that conservators removing corrosion from a brace uncovered the word “ULSTER.” It’s the first time a maker’s mark was found in the turret.

Officials believe an aft diagonal support brace was produced by Ulster Iron Works in Saugerties, about 100 miles north of New York City. The brace is between two guns and is separate from the large turret "ring."

“While this firm was never mentioned as a supplier during the Monitor’s construction at Continental Iron Works, it is now believed that Ulster provided materials for modifications to the ship while it was undergoing sea trials at the Brooklyn Navy Yard,” said the museum, which houses the USS Monitor Center.

Ulster Iron Works, which operated from 1827 to 1888 and took advantage of iron deposits in Ulster County, was a Navy contractor.

Will Hoffman, Monitor project manager, told the Picket his team is hypothesizing that when the ironclad was turned over to the Navy and the turret was tested, “they used Ulster to make modified parts. This makes sense, too, because the company was located just up the Hudson River.”  

Audrey Klinkenberg, historian for the town of Saugerties, said she had previously heard of a connection, but the find was compelling. “We’ve always had in our literature that Ulster Iron Works had made … plates for the Monitor.”

Interior of Monitor turret (Mariners' Museum and Park)

Beginning last August, conservators in Virginia used dry ice to remove corrosion from large wrought iron artifacts on the Monitor. Among the cleaned items were engine room structural bulkheads, gun slides and the forward and aft diagonal support braces from the turret, the museum said.

The turret, which housed the warship’s guns, currently rests on a lower support pad. Hoffman said his team is preparing for this summer’s placement of a new support system.

“Remember, the turret is upside down, and therefore, all the weight of the guns and carriages were resting on (the roof). The roof was not designed to hold that amount of weight,” Hoffman wrote in an email. “Currently, the turret is still sitting on that support pad, which inhibits our ability to remove the roof and subsequently turn the object over.”

Officials said they want to do more research on the role of Ulster Iron Works.

The manufacturer, which drew workers from as far away as England and Wales, was known for using European technology. A process called “double puddling” could produce appreciable amounts of high-grade bar iron.

Damage to the USS Monitor turret (Library of Congress)

Histories kept at the Saugerties Public Library provide accounts of the foundry’s history.

“History of Ulster County, New York,” written by Nathaniel B. Sylvester in 1880, details the manufacture of a chain with small links for the Navy. It passed a series of stress tests at the Navy yard in Washington.

Ulster Iron Works sat on the lower side of Esopus Creek in Saugerties. A dam and a long raceway cut through rock provided water power for the mill. The mill had an annual capacity of 6,700 net tons of iron products.

An old pamphlet, “Focus on Saugerties,” mentions the demise of the company after steel, which was stronger, began to surpass iron in demand.

The mill’s buildings are long gone. “The wheels have stopped turning and the Esopus Creek does no work.” The site, according to the book, serves as a “monument to advancing achievement.”

COMING SOON: More on Ulster Iron Works and what Saugerties is known for today

Puzzle solved: USS Monitor coat reassembled, displayed. Second puzzle: Who owned it?

One of the front panels (Images courtesy of The Mariners' Museum and Park)

Elsa Sangouard worked from drawings, PC to assemble pieces

Senior conservator Elsa Sangouard has worked inside the USS Monitor’s massive turret and on the gun carriages that held its two 11-inch Dahlgren guns.

While these and other iron pieces Sangouard has handled tell the story of the famed Federal ironclad’s instruments of death, a painstakingly conserved and reassembled sailor’s coat is her favorite artifact.

“Anything working with sailors is extremely touching. The coat represents the last minute of the ship and the drama for the entire crew,” she said.

Half of the delicate artifact late last year went on display in the replica captain’s stateroom at the USS Monitor Center of The Mariners’ Museum and Park in Newport News, Va. 

The tailor-made coat came out of the water when the turret was lifted in 2002. Officials said crew members likely threw off heavy coats as they scrambled off the USS Monitor during a terrible storm near Cape Hatteras, N.C., on Dec. 31, 1862. This coat was the only major item of clothing found in the wreck.

(Image courtesy of The Mariners' Museum and Park)

Visitors can gaze upon the reconstructed coat (click photo to enlarge), its six panels lying in a low-light, climate-controlled display case. Conservators dared not try to hang the artifact on a mannequin.

“All of the wool is in pretty good shape, but it is very fragile,” said project manager Will Hoffman. “If you can hang it, that means all the weight on the fiber is hanging off the individual fibers.”

The coat, even after these years, still wears a shroud of mystery: Who did it belong to? Was it one of two sailors whose remains were found in the turret? One of the 47 men who safely made it off the ironclad? Did an officer or enlisted man wear it?

Officials say it took a real team effort over more than a decade to conserve and display the item. For Sangouard, working with the tattered garment’s 137 pieces was like working on a jigsaw puzzle.

Coat’s design appears to be a ‘one off’

(Images courtesy of The Mariners' Museum and Park)

The “hybrid” dark blue, double-breasted coat was modified to serve as part of a U.S. Navy uniform. It’s a mix of a standard sack coat in the front, with a fitted, vented back of a classic frock coat.

Hoffman and Sangouard told the Picket they are puzzled by the coat design and its rubber buttons. The Novelty Rubber Co. produced the latter, using a Goodyear patent.

An officer likely would have used copper-alloy buttons. But why would an enlisted man go to the trouble of procuring a custom-made jacket, they ask.

John Quarstein, director of the center, told History Net that the garment might have belonged to a warrant officer such as a master’s mate, boatswain’s mate, gunner or quartermaster.

HistoryNet said one candidate is enlisted sailor Jacob Nicklis, one of 16 crew members lost with the USS Monitor. His father was a tailor in Buffalo, N.Y.

Working largely from fragments

(Photo courtesy of NOAA)

The remains (above) of the merino wool coat were found largely in a pile in the turret’s organic and iron sediment. While conservators weren’t positive what they had, they could make out collar fragments and a button hole. Cotton threads that held the panels together had dissolved after decades in saltwater.

The two front panels of the coat were largely intact, while much of the rest was in pieces. About 80 percent of the garment survives.

Sangouard, who joined the project five years after the turret was lifted, said smaller pieces were taken out of cool storage in 2009 to begin the conservation process.

(Image courtesy of The Mariners' Museum and Park)

Conservators found the appropriate methods for cleaning and soaking the coat in solution. That took more than a year.

Despite the cleaning, some iron corrosion caused by turret tools remain on some portions of the coat; in one case the fabric bears the shape of a tool handle.

Putting the puzzle ‘back together’

Once the cleaning was completed, Sangouard used transparent paper to draw all the fragments.

“We needed to document the exact size of each fragment before drying them, just in case there was going to be a size change,” she told the Picket.

The conservator scanned the transparent paper and retraced the shapes, using Adobe Illustrator. She then reduced the scale of all pieces.

(Image courtesy of The Mariners' Museum and Park)

“Once all the parts were smaller and digitized (smaller but still very accurate in shape), I worked on my PC like I would have at home on a jigsaw puzzle. 

“Without taking distance from the object and looking at all the parts from afar, only the main panels could be placed in relative position to one another. Using Illustrator helped find a fair amount of smaller connections that were really difficult to see when looking at the object itself. 

“In other words, tracing the pieces helped document the object before drying it, but also helped putting the puzzle back together.”

The coat eventually was sent to textile conservators in Richmond who adhered the pieces to the exhibit panels. The museum’s Bronze Door Society contributed $20,000 to the project.

To whom did the coat belong?

USS Monitor on James River in Virginia (U.S. Navy)

The coat will help further the museum's goal of bringing the human component to a story of the innovative ironclad that tangled with the Confederacy's CSS Virginia in nearby Hampton Roads in March 1862.

The USS Monitor, while smaller, was more nimble than the CSS Virginia, and the two vessels fought to what many consider a draw.

Hoffman, the project manager, said the garment gives museum visitors a human connection to the USS Monitor.

Officials would like to know who wore the jacket. They know the weight and sizes of most of the crew. Sangouard said the man was thin and not 6 feet tall.

“Can we figure out who it is?” asked Hoffman. “There is potential.”