Whatever happened to the USS Merrimack / CSS Virginia’s brass bell?

USS ALASKA

Captain
Joined
Mar 16, 2016
Whatever happened to the Merrimack’s brass bell?
By: Katherine Hafner, The Virginian-Pilot 1 day ago

Around 1875, a diver had a government contract to blow up parts of the wreck and salvage what could be saved.

He recovered the bell from the Elizabeth River and gave it to St. Paul's Catholic Church in Portsmouth, according to historical accounts, where it hung in the belfry until 1907. That year, a devastating fire swept through the church and broke the ironclad's bell vertically in half. The remains, along with other scrap metal from the fire, were sent to Baltimore to be recast into a new church bell, Park wrote.

But a Hampton Roads woman, "believing that the damaged Virginia bell was an important part of Southern history that should be preserved," went to the foundry and retrieved it before it was tossed into a melting pot, he wrote. It went to her brother-in-law upon her death, and subsequently to his daughter.

The daughter, W.E. Darden, later told the Pilot that her father " 'loved the bell' and would take it on the porch every New Year's Eve and use it to ring out the old year and ring in the new."

He'd had many offers to buy it, including from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, but refused to sell, according to the 1953 newspaper article.


Full article with pics can be found here - https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/01/05/whatever-happened-to-the-merrimacks-brass-bell/

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
Not to be confused with the bell of the USS Merrimac, a collier that was intended to be sunk to block the channel in the Cuban harbor of Santiago during the Spanish-American War, but was sunk by Spanish gunfire before she was in the correct position. That bell is the one in the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington DC.
 
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