USS Monitor Center’s opening marks Civil War battle anniversary
Published 9:00 pm Friday, March 9, 2007
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. – Exactly 145 years after the USS Monitor faced the Confederate ship CSS Virginia in the first clash of ironclads, a $30 million center dedicated to the Union vessel opened Friday.
The USS Monitor Center, a new wing of The Mariners’ Museum, houses more than 1,200 artifacts from the Civil War ship and an interactive exhibition on both armored vessels.
Gov. Timothy Kaine, who took part in a ribbon-cutting ceremony, said the center embodies the Old Testament phrase “beating a sword into a plowshare.” A ship built as a weapon of war, he said, now is “the centerpiece of an educational museum in a reunited nation not at war with itself.”
The Monitor, a new design, and the Virginia, built atop the hull of the Union steam frigate Merrimack, fought to a draw on March 9, 1862, near where the museum now stands. The battle made wooden warships obsolete.
The Monitor was “the greatest innovation of its time and forever revolutionized the nature of naval warfare,” undersea explorer Robert Ballard said. Ballard discovered the wreckage of the Titanic.
The 63,500-square-foot center features 18,000 square feet of exhibition space and 20,000 square feet of conservation labs and classrooms.
Galleries tell how the ironclads were built and feature efforts to recover artifacts from the wreckage of the Monitor, which sank, upside down, during a storm 16 miles off North Carolina’s coast on Dec. 31, 1862. Sixteen men died.
Among the artifacts is a revolving, cylindrical gun turret, which allowed the Monitor to remain in place while training its two guns on a target, at a time when other ships were forced to move the entire vessel to aim their banks of guns.
