CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (CN) — It’s one of the last places you’d expect a maritime mystery to rest: in the midst of an inland southern city, along the waterfront that has defined the city for decades.
Somewhere between two bridges spanning the Tennessee River in Chattanooga, the wrecked ship rests at the bottom of the river. For decades, the murky, brown-green water has flowed over her timbers, rusted the iron and steel and concealed her from joggers and walkers in the park on the bank above.
Her name and adventures through the Tennessee Valley have seemingly been lost to time. There have been stories, and someone out fishing sometimes gets a glimpse of the ghostly ship on their fish finder. But an anthropology professor and his class are aiming to figure out more.
At the end of a year disrupted by the pandemic, Morgan Smith, assistant anthropology professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, wanted to take his students out into the field and show them how to work the tools of the modern-day underwater anthropologist.
In mid-April, Smith and the students in his underwater archeology class rented a pontoon boat to scan the river with sonar equipment in the place they believed the ship rested.
Sonar cuts through the murk of water, Smith said.
“You can see all these features down there that are normally just, to the untrained eye, it's just a river. But to the person with sonar, it's so much more than that,” he said.
Smith has focused his work on underwater prehistoric archeology, such as the trash heaps and other remains of prehistoric people who lived on the land before the sea levels rose and helped preserve the sites.
He said underwater archeology is in demand because the construction of offshore rigging and windfarms requires archeological surveys. Because sonar equipment is integral to the field, Smith wanted to give his students a hands-on demonstration.
On April 10, the Tennessee Division of Archaeology granted Smith and his students a permit to examine the site.
It was the first time that the site had been recorded. It is only the 10th shipwreck in Tennessee waters known and recorded by the Division of Archeology. For comparison, Massachusetts, whose waters includes Cape Cod -- an infamous shipwreck graveyard -- has about 3,500 known shipwrecks.
Smith believes that the ship he saw on the sonar was a boat named the Chattanooga.
But the question is which Chattanooga is it, and the challenge is to pick it out from other features on the river bed, such as sunken barges.
“We did a really, really easy part, which is dragging the sonar instrument and using it to image stuff for us,” Smith said.
The next step is taking the map the sonar made and meticulously comparing the boat to the historical record, he said.
The most historically significant steamboat named the USS Chattanooga was the one the Union Army built in 1963 to ferry supplies to a starving Union Army. The Confederate Army, which had destroyed rail bridges and sat perched on Lookout Mountain, was strangulating the supplies flowing into Chattanooga, said Jim Ogden, historian at the National Park Service’s Chickamauga and Chattanooga Military Park.
So the Union quartermasters began building steamboats in Bridgeport, Alabama, to bring supplies to Chattanooga. Under the cover of darkness one October night in 1863, the first of those boats, the USS Chattanooga, pulled two barges worth of food to the Union army in Chattanooga, opening the cracker line.
After the war, the military sold the boat in May 1866 and its private owners were operating it away from its namesake city, according to a list of historical steamboats called Way’s Packet Directory.
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