When Ken Johnston learned that August was National Inventors’ Month, he decided that was a good theme for this weekend’s educational program at the National Civil War Naval Museum at Port Columbus.
“Cool History: Inventing a New Navy” will be presented this weekend.
“So many things tie into the changing Navy,” Ken Johnston, the museum’s director of programs and education, said.
Thanks to advances in ship-building technology, the first ironclad, USS Monitor, was built in just 118 days in Brooklyn, N.Y.
“It was an astounding achievement,” Johnston said. “Such a ship had never been seen before.”
It took more than two years to build the CSS Jackson right here in Columbus. Johnston said that ironclad, also known as the Muscogee, wasn’t even fully completed before it was burned in the Chattahoochee River by Union troops in 1865. It was recovered in 1961, and is now the centerpiece of the museum.
Johnston said during the Civil War the technology was as good in the South as it was in the North but Columbus was focused on making cannons and rifles.
“Brainpower was definitely there on both sides,” Johnston said. “It was which side manufactured it first. Which side turned brains into brawn, so to speak.”
During the war, the Columbus Naval Yard made ship engines that were taken to Savannah and Mobile.
“The marine engines were the best, and (they were) produced in Columbus,” under the direction of Naval Yard manager James Warner, Johnston said.
The lumber used in the construction of the CSS Jackson is believed to have been provided by master bridge builder Horace King. King, a freed slave, and two of his sons, John and Marshall, worked at the naval yard.
Johnston said documents state that the Kings worked at the shipyard and there are signs that indicate the lumber came from the Kings.
Johnston said the “knees,” or carved pieces of wood attached to the ship’s hull and the deck represent the technique that the Kings used to build bridges.
The Cool History event will also feature a screening of “Horace: The Bridge Builder King” by Tom Lenard of Auburn University. The screening will be about an hour long and will be followed by a question-and-answer session. Lenard and Thomas L. French, who co-wrote “Bridging Deep South River: The Life an Legend of Horace King” with John S. Lupold, will introduce King’s work.
