C.S.S. Alabama Virtual Exhibit

New C.S.S. Alabama Exhibit on the MUA:
"The online Museum of Underwater Archaeology is proud to announce the opening of our latest exhibit on the investigation of the CSS Alabama (http://www.uri.edu/mua). Based on the field work conducted from 2000 to 2002, it features three galleries covering the vessel's historical background, the methodology employed in the field, and the team's findings. In addition the exhibit hosts PDF copies of two reports, and an annotated bibliography."
I worked in the West Point Foundry Cove in Cold Spring, NY with Gordon Watts who has been on and off of this project for a long time, back then he was working on his doctorate at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and we did a number of remote-sensing tests and operations with Grossman & Associates, along with others from Texas A&M. The "C.S.S. Alabama" was sunk by a Parrott rifled cannon (patented) made in the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring, NY on the "U.S.S. Kearsarge". The EPA Region 2 archaeologist, John Vetter, was in the background, as we did the required archaeology for the then in design stages, National Priority Superfund Cleanup of the Marathon Battery Site, where batteries for NIKE missile defense rockets were made. It was a primarily cadmium and nickel contamination in the Foundry Cove, a part of Constitution Island which is on the east shore across the Hudson River from the West Point Military Academy, where one of the large iron chains were once stretched across the Hudson River, to stop a "divide and conquer" the British forces had planned for the Hudson River in the American Revolution.
The foundry came after, methinks, the fortifications designed during the Revolution by Bernard Romans a Dutch-American patriot on Constitution Island, currently held by the Academy. Michigan Technological University is starting its fifth field season in the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring (named by George Washington, two of the early foundations appear to be "Virginian" as seen in Henry Glassie's work) of industrial archaeology, in the Foundry proper which was off limits to us. However, we did recover R.P. Parrott's gun platform, I think the prototype of the one used (over 600 spent friction primers, 2 EOD empty shells), field-named "Swamp Angel" used in an incendiary bombardment of Charleston, South Carolina in 1863, which was written about in a poem by Herman Melville "Swamp Angel". The wooden platform and pintle, on wooden grillage, was found under the large industrial remains of the company's "Bridge Shop" which burned c. 1913, ceasing operations of that large company's (one of more than a couple) use of the access to railroad and ocean about 50 miles north of New York City, where the circa Civil War operations had their offices.
There was quite a fine levied against Great Britain in Switzerland for the C.S.S. Alabama construction, adjudged in violation of treaty.