C.S.S. Georgia

When my family went south on our trip, we visited a lot of places.  A place that we all wanted to see what Old Fort Jackson because it had advertised that there was an ironclad there.  After some research, we learned that it was the C.S.S. Georgia.  My family went to Old Fort Jackson after seeing Fort Pulaski which is covered in another post on this site.  When we arrived at the fort, we didn’t see any ironclad.  So we decided that it might be in the other side of the fort so we went through the tour and walked around.  There was still no ironclad.  Puzzled, we asked a guide where it was, figuring they took it out of the water for the winter.  He took us outside and pointed at a red buoy in the river.  “There it is,” he told us, “20 feet below that buoy.”  Apparently, the C.S.S. Georgia sunk 150 years ago.  To this day we still don’t understand how advertising works.  However, the story of the Georgia was still pretty neat.  The funding for the Georgia came from the women of Atlanta who were still at home while their husbands went to war.  They decided that they wanted to fund an ironclad for the south and paid the entire sum.  The product was the Georgia.  The Georgia packed a massive payload, however the engine was too small.  It could barely make headway upriver and therefore was seemingly useless to do a lot of good for the Confederacy.  However, nobody really wanted to tell the women of Atlanta, (Who could blame them?) so they pulled it out of sight of the city and it became a floating battery.  They anchored it next to Old Fort Jackson and it sat there until Atlanta surrendered.  When Atlanta fell, the Georgia was packed with explosives and sunk by the Confederates who didn’t want the Union to capture it.  To this day it still sits in the bottom of the river, right where it was left.