We are on the banks of the chattahoochee river. The purpose of the naval museum is to tell the story of the navies in the civil war. We are the only facility that focuses entirely on that story. We are in a unique place right here inside the museum, right here inside the museum are the remains of the ironclad that was built in columbus during the war. Specifically, we are about midship of the vessel. This section was missing. It fell apart during the recovery process, and this was a great Vantage Point to take a good look at how this thing is built, and what areas are used are different purposes. For different purposes. An ironclad is a wooden ship. You still have to build the structure of the ship out of wood. On the outside of it, above the waterline, is iron plating. This provides the ironclad to the vessel. If you want to think about it like this, it is like putting a man inside of armor. Most of the ironclads are used in coastal waters and rivers and what they were designed to do is essentially protect, in the confederates case, protect local port cities and river towns, which leads us to why the jackson was built in columbus and columbus is so far from the coastline. Columbus is the second most important Industrial Site in the entire confederacy. The Confederate Navy began building this ironclad here to protect this very important site. There was always the fear that the union navy would mount an attack up the chattahoochee river to take this city. The reason the columbus is such an important target is because of the industrial capacity here. In they are producing uniforms boots, munitions here. This is where the columbus depot was. The uniforms produced here went largely to the western army. This is an internal way for the confederate to produce their own material rather than having to import so much from outside. Construction on the jackson began in august 1862. She was launched into the river in december of 1864, when wilsons raid came through alabama and had columbus. The bottle battle of columbus took place. April 16, 1865 general james wilson is a Union Cavalry officer, and he commanded 10,000 cavalry troops. Their job was to attack through the states of alabama and georgia. Their goal is to destroy important targets like columbus because of industrial output to disrupt supply lines, disrupt communications, anything they can do to further along the collapse of the confederacy. Typically and ironclad especially like the jackson, would be used at a port city and if there is an approaching army, the vessel can move up around the waterway and fire its big guns at the opposing forces. This is typically what confederate ironclads did. However, in the case of the jackson, she is right at completion in april 65 and there is no crew for it yet. Officially, the Confederate Navy has her on the list, official Navy Register as the next ship to be officially commissioned. However, the war is winding down and the confederacy is collapsing. There is no crude for the jackson available yet. During the battle of columbus, she sat at the navy yard. The navy guys never could come aboard and get her steam up. There wasnt enough men available to do this. It sat there during the battle and did nothing. Its a nice showpiece, so to speak. The next morning on the 17th wilsons men came into the navy yard and they started burning everything. They cant leave a viable weapon like this behind them, so they stuff flammables all over the ship and they set it on fire and they cast it loose into the river. For two weeks, this vessel is slowly floating downstream the chattahoochee and burning. There is a debris field between here and the final wreck sites. I finally caught it finally got caught in the bend of the river, and she sank. The water finally put out the fires, and we have what is left of her now. Her length is 225 feet long and shes 57 feet wide at her widest spot. We estimate she weighed 2000 tons. The majority of the ship is made out of wood. It is when construction, and the hull is made of a southern longleaf. We are at the back of the the stern of the casemate. This gives us a great advantage to see what they call would look like. The hull would look like. This vessel is designed specifically for river travel. It is designed not to go out on the open ocean, but specifically for the problems of the river. Here this wood plank was sort of like an edge, because it is an edge. This is where the iron plates would come down, just wrapped around what is called the knuckle. You have the waterline here and the iron plates come here and the ends are resting on this wood plank here. Also, if you will notice, the wood planks, the boards here they look like theyve got cracks in between them. Its very wide apart. But, this is the problem when the vessel was recovered, when they brought it out of the water they set it up on the shore and let it dry out. It cracked and constricted. When she was launched into the river, one of the local newspapers reporters noted in the paper that she floated like a duck on a pond. She barely leaped. An amazing job those constructors did on this vessel. From this Vantage Point, youre looking towards the stern of the vessel. Youre looking at the back. Moving forward, you can see where the shafts of the propeller are embedded in the whole of the ship, where they come through the hull. The shafts would have been coming forward towards the pistons of the steamship, or the steam engine. You get those pistons moving back and forth, turning the propeller shaft. You have two of those, two big ones right here along this section behind this superstructure. And right here is where the steam engine would sit. Youve got the boilers right here, and if youre able to look up, weve got a recreation of the smokestack. Weve got the smokestack going straight up, and up above the upper deck, the smokestack extends about 40 feet. From this Vantage Point we are able to look down on the jackson trade we are essentially at deck level. You looking out towards the main casemate of the ironclad. Those oval shapes you see are the gun ports of the jackson. The jackson is armed with six brooke rifles. The brooke rifle is a rifle gun. It fires large bullets instead of cannonballs. The brooke rifle has an effective range of about five miles, and a solid round lays about 120 pounds. The particular brooke rifle we are firing today is one of the guns built specifically for the jackson. He was cast at the silva naval works in selma, alabama, and completed in january 1865. At your command. Ready fire [explosion] jeff seymour boom, you have the explosion. It is simple, yet so effective. After the war, people basically knew where she went down. Its not a question of having to discover where she was. The physical process of recovery of the jackson took place in the early 1960s. They began working on a process in 1961, and they started to build a dam around the wreck site, and they try to flush the water out of the interior. They had to start digging the gun boat out of the mud. When they pulled the vessel out of the river bank, what they had to do is tell this material back up the river, and they used a tug boat. Theyve got some flotation devices under it and so forth, but they are pulling the wreck the two pieces of the wreck up the chattahoochee river with a tug boat. They have to live it with cranes up on the river bank. That was at the location of the old museum. In the late 1990s they begin construction on this nice, new facility. It was completed in 2001. In order to move this vessel from that place to this location, they used one of those big trucks that they move houses on. They had to move it very carefully down one of the streets of columbus. When they actually build the building, they built three sides here and they backed the hull of the jackson in here, set the braces under it, and slowly pulled the truck out from under it. Once they got everything in here and in place, they build the back all to the building wall to the building. It was an amazing engineering feat to pull this off. There are only four ironclads from the civil war that we can study right now. The jackson is right here, and this is why this facility is here. It is first and foremost to tell the story of this particular ironclad, and to show people there are more than just one or two ironclads. There were many. We have one of the best examples of that right here. Find out where the city tour is going next online at cspan. Org citytour. Each week american artifacts takes viewers and to archives museums, and Historic Sites around the country. We visit the huge visit the National Museum of health and medicine to look at items in their civil war collection. Some viewers may find images in this program disturbing. Mr. Clarke welcome. Im tim clarke and im the museums Deputy Director and we are spending time on the civil war medicine exhibit and special other th