News Mallows Bay, Maryland.

[Notebook]

Didn't know about this, is it well known in the US?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-41951057/nature-reclaims-us-battleship-graveyard

N.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

Pretty well known if you are around the area area, they are pretty restrictive about boating around it. No wake areas, look but no touch, etc. There wasn't much of a boat ramp there when I was stationed at Pax River. But boating around the Patuxent River, Potomac River (and of course the Chesepeake Bay) is a big deal.

I understand it's now an archaeological site with all the protections that go with it.

No battleships IIRC, but a whole mess of merchies that were wooden hulled with iron reinforcement. They were obsolete as soon as they were launched and were nothing trouble once launched.

 

[Notebook]

Interesting, I guess it wasn't worth clearing them out in the past, and now they are a tourist attraction?

 

[Andy44]

Seems strange they weren't sent to the breakers and sold for scrap. I haven't heard of it, but I have heard of "lost" colonies along the Potomac in this area, settlement towns that were later abandoned back in the 1600s or so and reclaimed by nature, mostly private property now.

 

[Graham2001]

Pretty well known if you are around the area area, they are pretty restrictive about boating around it. No wake areas, look but no touch, etc. There wasn't much of a boat ramp there when I was stationed at Pax River. But boating around the Patuxent River, Potomac River (and of course the Chesepeake Bay) is a big deal.

I understand it's now an archaeological site with all the protections that go with it.

No battleships IIRC, but a whole mess of merchies that were wooden hulled with iron reinforcement. They were obsolete as soon as they were launched and were nothing trouble once launched.

Those wooden hulled ships were what they called "War emergency construction", had the war lasted into 1919 they were going to be the ships that would have carried/supplied the second wave of American troops sent to Europe, if they made one voyage it was to have been considered a success.

After the war a book was written about the program.

Building the emergency fleet; a historical narrative of the problems and achievements of the United States shipping board emergency fleet corporation

https://archive.org/stream/buildingemergenc00matt#page/n0/mode/2up

 

[Notebook]

Wow! Wasn't expecting anything like this.
How did you know about it?

N.

 

[Graham2001]

Wow! Wasn't expecting anything like this.
How did you know about it?

N.

Would you believe, role playing, I'd found a site with deck plans (Linked below) for a lot of the freighters built under the War Emergency Program while looking for plans to use with Call of Cthulhu, I thought I'd look into where they came from and found the whole story, which got overshadowed by the Liberty ship program in WWII.

Quite literally the US found it's shipbuilding industry stretched to the limit by their entry into WWI (Remember the United States was already selling large quantities of material to the Allied Powers.) even with the standardized designs cooked up by the newly created US Shipping Board and shortcuts like wooden hulled/steel framed (Composite) or Concrete hulled freighters, the US Govt actually had to order ships from Chinese and Japanese shipyards (Look for ships with the name "East <WORD> or Eastern <WORD>" to find the Japanese vessels.) to meet the projected demand for ships.

Register of Ships Owned by United States Shipping Board, August 1, 1920

http://shipscribe.com/shiprefs/USSB_1920/