Virginia Vacation 2016

[Mark F. Jenkins]

Lots of photos coming up! I took more, but these are the highlights....

At Fort Necessity along the National Road. (My wife reached down to rub her knee and our silly children immediately imitated her, which I did not realize while I was taking the picture...) We hadn't intended going to Fort Necessity, but the route the GPS took us went right past it, so we said, why not?

I had an argument with these gentlemen at the Mount Washington Tavern by Fort Necessity, but despite my excellent points they were unmoved.

National Museum of the Marine Corps near Quantico; life-size diorama of Marine Cpl. John F. Mackie, first Marine to be awarded the Medal of Honor, firing out of one of Galena's gunports at Drewry's Bluff.

National Museum of the Marine Corps; One of the sledgehammers used to break into the engine house where John Brown was holed up in Harper's Ferry.

National Museum of the Marine Corps. Different period, but neat: this Douglas SBD "Dauntless" spent over fifty years at the bottom of Lake Michigan, where it had ended up after a training accident, before being painstakingly restored to this condition by volunteers.

 

[Mark F. Jenkins]

One of the Merrimack/Virginia's anchors outside the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. (Yeah, I know it's been renamed, but that's the only name I can remember...)

At least a portion of the propeller shaft of Merrimack/Virginia. See? The sign even says "Museum of the Confederacy." So there.

Anchor chain salvaged from the USS Cumberland.

Chunk of armor, ostensibly from the Virginia.

 

[Mark F. Jenkins]

This one's for the Texans, especially Nathanb1. Dick Dowling's sword.

A handsome cutaway model of CSS Richmond.

A great model of a Clyde River -style steam blockade runner. Reminds me; I still need to pick up a copy of Michael P. Usina's memoirs.

ETA: The model includes a tiny version of "Tinker," Usina's dog, on the bridge (not visible in this photo, though).

The globetrotting CSS Shenandoah.

A model of the Confederacy's "aircraft carrier," the tug CSS Teaser operating a balloon (which was not really made of silk dresses).

 

[Mark F. Jenkins]

The Confederate White House is almost completely surrounded by the VCU Medical complex, but there are no plans to move it. Parking will be increasingly difficult; the staff said there are plans for a shuttle to run from the Tredegar museum when it opens, making the best of a tough situation.

The gardens of the Governor's Palace at Colonial Williamsburg.

The supposedly-haunted Peyton Randolph house in Colonial Williamsburg. (The real history of the house and the family is more interesting than the ghost stories, IMHO.)

More to follow...

 

[BillO]

Welcome from Virginia and come again soon. You represent our favorite kind of Yankee. You're respectful, appreciative, you spent money and then you left!.

 

[cash]

Lots of photos coming up! I took more, but these are the highlights....

View attachment 103563
I had an argument with these gentlemen at the Mount Washington Tavern by Fort Necessity, but despite my excellent points they were unmoved.

Only a real dummy would have been unmoved by the searing logic of your argument.

 

[cash]

Great photos. Did you make it to the Mariner's Museum also? I used to live in that area.

 

[pamc153PA]

Love Williamsburg, colonial and otherwise! We took our son there last year--it was my husband's and my third time there.

Even ten years ago when we visited the MoC and the Confederate WH, it was pretty well surrounded by the hospital and its buildings. And hard to find a parking spot, too!

Did you get a chance to see Hollywood Cemetery? That's one of my favorite spots anywhere!

 

[FarawayFriend]

Great photos, thanks for sharing!!
We will be on vacation in Virgina also, prior to the Gettysburg CWT reunion. Looking at these photos I almost can't wait ...

 

[Mark F. Jenkins]

Great photos. Did you make it to the Mariner's Museum also? I used to live in that area.

Oh yeah... those are coming up... right now!

This IX-inch Dahlgren was part of the armament of CSS Virginia; the muzzle was blown off by a shot from USS Cumberland. As sturdy as Dahlgrens were, the gun crew continued to fire it (though they had to put out fires from around the inside of the gunport at least once)... John V. Quarstein pointed out the battering that the trunnions had taken, indicating that this may have been one of the pieces that Union sailors unsuccessfully tried to disable by sledge-hammering off the trunnions at the fall of Norfolk.

The family aboard the USS Monitor replica outside the Mariners Museum Monitor Center.

There are two replica turrets inside; this one represents how it looked when it was raised...

... and the other shows a cutaway of how it looked originally.

Another angle. This is a good view of the way they drilled the gunport as three distinct circles. I also wonder what sort of noise that the gun carriages made upon recoil... metal to metal contact, it looks like! Yow...

This one shows some detail of the armor construction. No bolt or rivet goes all the way through from outside to inside, and the armor plates were alternately dovetailed together.

Once a way to haul up the turret, and now it's a historical artifact in its own right: the "spider" turret framework from the recovery lift.

 

[Mark F. Jenkins]

The display in the Monitor Center positions many of the principal artifacts and replicas in their correct spatial relationships to each other; note the life-size (simplified) illustration of the engine in relation to the actual propeller. They also line up with the 1:1 replica just outside (not visible in this photo).

The propeller and a section of the propeller shaft. (The perfectionist streak in me was irritated that they don't quite line up, but I told that streak to shut up and enjoy...)

Engine room artifacts.

A miniature model of the turret's turning mechanism.

Looking up at the replica turret machinery from below.

The Monitor's four-fluked anchor.

 

[Mark F. Jenkins]

An officer in his (replica) Monitor stateroom; the items in clear cases are actual artifacts. The ceilings are unusually high for a 19th-Century warship, since there was only one lower level between the bottom and the deck. John V. Quarstein stated that one of the reasons that Ericsson furnished the officers' quarters so richly (and at his own expense) was to help reconcile them to the fact that officer's country was forward, rather than aft, as was traditional (since the aft part of the Monitor was mostly filled with machinery).

The replica wardroom, with officers' staterooms around; the captain's stateroom and office are ahead.

The story of the Monitor is of course incomplete without her primary adversary, and the Virginia is well-represented, in this instance by a life-sized replica of the forward part of the casemate as it might have looked while under construction. (The Brooke Rifle hanging from the rope is a fiberglass replica, not the real McCoy...)

A nice sectional representation of the Virginia's layered casemate; two courses of two-inch iron plating over about two feet of oak and pine.

Aboard the Virginia under construction. The workmen have already installed the tracks for the forward pivot gun, which is presumably the piece lying on the deck at left.

I took this and the next shot specifically for John (rebelatsea) and our other technically-minded seafaring types; this is how the forward cutwater is represented.

The "pig iron" ballast within the forward cutwater of the Virginia replica.

 

[Mark F. Jenkins]

And now the exciting stuff...

The small-artifact conservation area. There are Monitor artifacts in most or all of the plastic tubs on the shelves.

Hannah Piner (facing the camera) introducing our tour group to the large-artifact conservation area.

Assorted engine artifacts and pieces in a solution tank.

And now, what we came here for... entering the turret conservation tank.

I took many more shots than this, but didn't want to bore everyone with repetition. I did get to touch the turret. We did not actually go inside it, though; just walked around the outside of it.

The substantial dent at the upper right was sustained by a solid Brooke rifle bolt at Drewry's Bluff. The dent is also visible from the inside, evidently. If the Monitor had not been at long range (she could not elevate her guns very much and so was a ways away from Drewry's), this hit might have been problematic.

The two dents "above" (actually below; the turret is still inverted, as it has been since it was found) were inflicted by CSS Virginia as her gun crews attempted to put shots through the Monitor's gunports. These dents are visible in the 1862 photos taken aboard Monitor in the James River. (The bar-shaped contraption is to help hold the pendulum port stopper in place and keep it from possibly crashing down as the encrustation, etc., is removed.)

 

[Mark F. Jenkins]

The obligatory "I was there" selfie. (The newspaper section is part of the Columbus "Dispatch"; if you send in a vacation photo with the travel section visible, they might print your photo...)

One of the Dahlgren gun carriages in solution.

One of the XI-inch Dahlgrens in solution.

The Dahlgren's muzzle; I couldn't get far enough away on the platform to get the whole thing in one frame...

Upstairs in the conservation lab, about to handle some real artifacts! Note the handprint on the T-shirt of the gent at center; he specifically wore it to get some Monitor grime on him, and Hannah gave him a hand with it!

In the case is a sailor's jacket undergoing conservation. The jacket still "remembered" its collar fold once it had been straightened out and mended a bit.

 

[Mark F. Jenkins]

Hard-rubber button from a sailor's coat.

The backside of the button is clearly labeled with the Goodyear name. (The white writing is an artifact accession number.)

A piece of silverware, probably from the officers' mess. Hannah said that there were a lot of artifacts in the turret that didn't belong there; the suspicion is that, when the abandon-ship call went out, sailors grabbed whatever they could to take with them, but then abandoned most of it in the turret when they realized how difficult it was going to be to go out on the deck to get to the lifeboat.

This fork was originally silver-plated, but most of that metal is gone; what's left is some sort of copper-alloy core.

This "copper-alloy" (probably brass, but they can't say for certain just yet) piece is a fitting from the sighting mechanism. Two sighting-holes pierced the turret wall at an offset degree (not quite 90 degrees) from the axis of the guns; there would probably have been some sort of glass lens or fitting in the large hole. The officer sighting through this would have been concentrating on elevation for the guns, since side-to-side training would have been taken care of by the rotation of the turret. In the actual event, the Monitor's crew found this arrangement useless, and I don't think it was repeated on further monitors.

This sucker was a weighty hunk of metal! The screws/bolts visible (not 100% certain of their function) turned easily in the threads once the piece was conserved.

Main pieces of a Worthington pump undergoing conservation in the lab.

 

[Mark F. Jenkins]

Two external panoramic photo-mosaics taken at different times during the conservation.

Internal panoramic photo-mosaics. I just noticed what looks like a 20th-Century federal reserve note on the wall below it; I didn't spot it at the time, so I have no idea what that's about.

Peering down into the turret tank from the observation platform outside the conservation area.

While I was in the conservation lab, my wife and kids took in a movie in the Mariners Museum theatre about Arctic exploration, and took a walk in the park, where they discovered many many turtles in Lake Maury!

 

[Mark F. Jenkins]

From one turret in Newport News to a bunch more in Norfolk: the battleship Wisconsin at Nauticus.

From the bow looking aft at the Wisconsin next to the Nauticus building (a fine museum in its own right). I can only imagine the racket those chains made when the anchors were being raised or lowered.

Traditionally, one of a U.S. warship's gun crews was composed of Marines. (I don't know how they handle that in the missile era.) The five-inch dual mount is in what's properly called a "gunhouse" rather than a "turret," incidentally.

The Wisconsin is pretty much as she was when decommissioned, so there's 1990s-era stuff aboard. This interested me; for some reason, it's called a "bullseye," and it tells you where you are on the ship: in this case, on deck one (counting from the main deck upward into the superstructure), 89th frame, first compartment to port (numbered even to port, odd to starboard, so the space like this going the other way would be "-1-" instead of "-2-"), classed "L" ("living" space, meaning it's for people rather than machinery, ammo, fuel, or something else), and the space goes from the 89th frame to the 95th frame. "S-5" is a code indicating who's responsible for maintaining this area, and tells an inspecting officer whom to yell at if it's not up to par.

The tour I took concentrated on command and control areas; this is the CEC, Combat Engagement Center (not to be confused with the CIC, Combat Information Center). The gentleman to the right was our tour guide; the kid in the elevated seat at center left is sitting in the tactical officer's position. This is basically how it would have appeared in 1991 during the Gulf War in the CEC, minus some classified equipment and a few things deemed too valuable to leave on a decommissioned ship.

On the navigation bridge (looking to right/starboard). The tour guide told a funny-but-true story about the windows; as originally constructed, the Iowa-class battleships had navigation bridges open to the sky and the elements, but that turned out to be less than practical in the North Atlantic in particular. But when they glassed in the bridge, when they fired the main armament, all the windows shattered. Next, they replaced the glass with a new material called "plexiglass," and that worked a tad better; instead of shattering, the windows blew out all in one piece. A junior officer suggested that they take a page from automobiles and put a handcrank on each window, so they could be rolled down when the main guns were about to fire.

 

[Mark F. Jenkins]

After all this glorious Navy stuff, the rest was houses.

This is The Ferry Plantation in Virginia Beach. This is where Henry Walke was born on Christmas Eve, 1808, albeit not in this house; the left-hand wing of this house was an outbuilding of the original plantation house that burned in the 1820s; the present, somewhat-smaller house was built largely of bricks salvaged from the burned structure (and some of them are rather impressively fired, almost glassy to the touch). The building shouldn't look like this; a well-meaning-but-uninformed contractor sandblasted the original oyster-shell stucco off the bricks some years ago. The director of the Friends of Ferry Plantation told me that a number of the artifacts displayed at Colonial Williamsburg actually were found at The Ferry! This is one of those unfortunate places where the historical value and interest far outstrips the funding available; I plan to make The Ferry one of my regular charities to donate to.

A substantially more-famous (and much-better-funded) house; Jefferson's Monticello near Charlottesville. (Photography is not allowed inside for legal reasons-- some of the artifacts are loaned from other museums and collections and Monticello does not have reproduction rights for all of them, so it's easier to simply ban photography-- unfortunately.) This is the west face of the building, the "nickel view," as they call it. The dome is surprisingly hard to see from any closer than this. The main entrance (front of the house) is to the right.

A garden veranda at Monticello. The views from the top of the hill are rather nice; small wonder Jefferson loved the place so much.


There were many more photos, and we did some other things like a sunset dolphin-spotting cruise off Virginia Beach, but that's plenty to inflict on you all! Wonderful trip, great weather for nearly all of it.

 

[jackt62]

Those are some amazing photos. I may have not read it in the descriptions but is the Monitor museum located in Norfolk?

 

[Mark F. Jenkins]

Did you get a chance to see Hollywood Cemetery? That's one of my favorite spots anywhere!

Not this trip... I had a hard enough time convincing the kids to put up with a visit to the cemetery where my grandparents and great-grandparents are buried!