Huntsville was ordered on May 1, 1862, by the Confederate States Navy. She was launched at the Confederate Naval Works at Selma on February 7, 1863, and finished in Mobile. She was finally delivered on August 1, 1863. She was only partially armored, with the armor plate delivered by the Shelby Iron Company of Shelby, Alabama, and the Atlanta Rolling Mill.[3] She had defective engines that were obtained from a river steamer and an incomplete armament, so was assigned to guard the waters around Mobile.[3]
Huntsville escaped up the Spanish River following the Battle of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864. The city of Mobile held out another eight months, with the upper portion of Mobile Bay remaining in Confederate hands. She, along with the CSS Tuscaloosa, was scuttled to prevent capture on April 12, 1865, following the surrender of the city. The wreck lies where the Spanish River splits off from the Mobile River on the north side of Blakeley Island, just north of Mobile, until being located in 1985.[4]
Notes
^National Archives of the United States, Record Group 45, David G. Farragut to Gideon Welles, September 26, 1864
^Herbert J. Lewis (September 23, 2011). "Selma Ordnance and Naval Foundry". The Encyclopedia of Alabama. Auburn University. Archived from the original on September 29, 2013. Retrieved September 23, 2011.
^ ab"Huntsville". Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. United States Navy.
^Gaines, W. Craig (2008). Encyclopedia of Civil War Shipwrecks. LSU Press. pp. 1–8. ISBN978-0-8071-3274-6.
References
Bisbee, Saxon T. (2018). Engines of Rebellion: Confederate Ironclads and Steam Engineering in the American Civil War. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press. ISBN978-0-81731-986-1.
Canney, Donald L. (2015). The Confederate Steam Navy 1861-1865. Atglen, Pennsylvania: Schiffer Publishing. ISBN978-0-7643-4824-2.
Silverstone, Paul H. (2006). Civil War Navies 1855–1883. The U.S. Navy Warship Series. New York: Routledge. ISBN0-415-97870-X.
Silverstone, Paul H. (1984). Directory of the World's Capital Ships. New York: Hippocrene Books. ISBN0-88254-979-0.
Still, William N. Jr. (1985) [1971]. Iron Afloat: The Story of the Confederate Armorclads. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN0-87249-454-3.
Confederate States