Where Were These Discussesd? Ozark, Signal, One more- Gunboat?

JPK Huson 1863

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
Joined
Feb 14, 2012
Location
Central Pennsylvania
As usual, am making hash of our search- I think I RE bumped into these but maybe not? Always keep a weather eye out for ships, generally photos surface which are familiar. Pretty sure these will be to both Mark and Andy and not only that you'll have years of service, Captain(s) and when Ozark came into Union service? I have no knowledge this ship was ever Confederate, it's just a guess based on her name- or was she pre-war?

No description on the first, wooden gunboat? Seems a lot too full of 'stuff' to be a mere transport, right? This ship looks like it means business although wooden gunboats always seem so vulnerable to me. Descriptions of what happens inside them when hit in battle are always so awful, dating from the earliest naval battles.

ship1.jpg

ship2.JPG


gunboat ozark.jpg

OK, maybe have seen this before, because I think I remember thinking she looks like a small, unfortunate village afloat- needs a couple chickens on the flat roof. Do not mean to be mean about the boat, just what it looks like, like a houseboat except for that business like gun aft.

gunboat signal.jpg

And a riverboat steamer converted to war time use? What is the meaning of the " 9 " ? OH, tinclad? Here again, always think how vulnerable those massive smokestacks have to be.

Yes, I know beginner questions. Just like ships- pretty happy I stuck to 3 considering the 30 or so there are in this file.
 
Just a quick pass...

First photo: From the height of the funnel and the look of the masts, I'd call that one of the Unadilla class "90-day gunboats." (There looks like there's another vessel hiding just behind her, though I can't really make out what it is.)

Second photo: One of the odd facts about the Ozark is that her original proposal included an underwater cannon. It didn't make it into the final design. Ozark was also notorious as a fuel hog. She's often grouped with the sternwheel monitors Osage and Neosho, but those were much more effective and successful designs.

Third photo: "Tinclad" (or Light-Draught) Gunboat Number Nine was USS Forest Rose, a converted sternwheel packet. She's fairly typical of the "tinclads," though she carried a slightly heavier armament than most of them (8 guns-- two 30-pounder rifles, two 32-pounder smoothbores, and four 24-pounder howitzers, according to records). This photo is a good illustration of what was done to turn a steamboat into a "tinclad"-- enclose the main deck with a (often prefabricated) casemate, remove the "texas" and glassy civilian pilothouse and put a protected "military" pilothouse in their place, and load some guns aboard. Quick and cheap. They had to number them to keep track-- there were more than fifty of the things!

Yeah, the chimneys were fairly vulnerable-- but they were also pretty quick and easy to repair, being just pipes made of thin iron.
 
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For comparison, here's the civilian sternwheeler Abigail:

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She has a pretty plain pilothouse compared to some, but by comparing her and Forest Rose you can get a good idea of what they did to make a gunboat out of a vessel like that.
 
Mark has already responded, so I'll just add a comment re: the vulnerability of the "tinclads." They weren't expected to slug it out with Confederate warships or shore batteries. Their role was to extend the navy's reach to maintain control of the rivers. Their armor was really only proof against small-arms fire, but that's (mostly) what they were likely to encounter. For that purpose, a converted civilian steamer worked reasonably well.

A more modern analogy might be the "Brown Water Navy" patrol boats used in Vietnam, or similar craft used by British forces around Basra during the Iraq War.
 
First image - I'd say the ship in the foreground is the Aroostook. Can't make out the one behind. As for the side wheeled gunboat suggest Agawam, Mendota or Massassoit.
 
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