U.S.S. CAIRO comprising A Narrative of Her Wartime Adventures by Virgil Carrington Jones and An Account of Her Raising in 1964 by Harold L. Peterson National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior Washington, D.C. 1971 The U.S.S. Cairo was sunk in the Yazoo River by a Confederate torpedo in December 1862. A century later, she was raised and salvaged along with thousands of priceless artifacts. The boat, currently owned by the State of Mississippi, is now at Pascagoula, Miss., awaiting reco

For 11 years, I was closely associated with the Cairo project, and I know how difficult it is to place the undertaking in its proper perspective and to dispassionately evaluate its historical significance. I was accordingly delighted to learn that Virgil Carrington Jones, who needs no introduction to readers interested in Civil War partisan operations and action afloat, had agreed to chronicle the story of the Cairo and her rendezvous with destiny on the Yazoo in December 1862; and that Harold L

Eads ironclads under construction at the Carondelet shipyards near St. Louis. The Cairo , although not built here, would have looked much the same at this stage. National Archives Some men and some ships seem fated for bad luck. It was the Union ironclad Cairo’s fate to have as her second and last captain a man who, although a hard worker, was a repeated slave to misfortune. Three of the vessels on which he served, their names all beginning with the letter C, went to the bottom in the order name

Even in fragments, the Cairo proved a treasure. Experts from the Smithsonian Institution and the National Park Service found it a gold mine of information. It was, in fact, a century-old time capsule loaded with the everyday objects of naval life, some of them previously completely unknown. Studied in situ , they told of practices and customs no one had even dreamed about before. Even the vessel itself offered new information, for students quickly discovered that it had not been built according