Jettisoned: History, Discovery, and Recovery of the CSS Pee Dee armament

James D. Spirek

Jettisoned: History, Discovery, and Recovery of the CSS Pee Dee armament

Year: 2020

Summary

This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In 2019, three cannons from the CSS Pee Dee were installed between the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs building and the National Cemetery in Florence, South Carolina. The cannons were jettisoned at the Mars Bluff Naval Yard and the gunboat scuttled in the Great Pee Dee River during the waning days of the American Civil War. The presence of these cannons represents the culmination of several decades of searching, discovering, recovering and conserving them for public display. Situated between these two military edifices, the display was not intended as a memorial, but rather to reflect on the sacrifices made by those in the armed services and of the complexity of human conflict. The project to document and recover the cannons relied on private and public partnerships. This presentation will provide historical background and archaeological findings from the investigations of the cannons, CSS Pee Dee, and the Mars Bluff Naval Yard.