Home   March 2007 

South Carolina

Military History

Ft. Sumter was named after the Revolutionary War patriot Thomas Sumter.   Here, on April 12, 1861, the first shots of the Civil War were fired.

The H. L. Hunley man-powered submarine, almost 40 feet (12 m) long, was built at Mobile, Alabama, launched in July 1863, and shipped by rail to Charleston, SC on August 12, 1863. On February 17, 1864, Hunley attacked and sank the 1800-ton steam sloop USS Housatonic in Charleston harbor, but soon after, Hunley also sank, drowning all 8 crewmen. Over 136 years later, on August 8, 2000, the wreck was recovered, and on April 17, 2004, the DNA-identified remains of the eight Hunley crewmen were interred in Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery, with full military honors.

Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum

The diesel-powered submarine CLAMAGOR (SS-343) was commissioned at New London, Conneticut in June 1945, a few weeks before the end of WWII.  She spent her 30 year carrier operating out of Key West, Charleston, and New London Coneticut.  Her length is 325.5 feet, displacement over 1,800 tons, speed 20 knots on the surface, 10 to 17 knots submerged.  She was armed with 10 torpedo tubes, and carried a crew of 8 officers and 72 men.  CLAMAGORE was decommissioned in 1975 and towed to Patriots Point in 1981.

The YORKTOWN (CV-10) was named after the old YORKTOWN (CV-5), lost while repeling the Japaneese Fleet at the Battle of Midway in 1942.  Built in Newport News Virginia, the new YORKTOWN was commissioned on April 15, 1943.  It is 888 feet long, originally displaced 27,100 tons (was later modified with an angled deck for jets, then displaced 41,000 tons), and carried a crew of 380 officers, 3,088 enlisted men, and an air group of 90 planes.   Two years before being decommissioned in 1970, she recovered the Apollo 8 astronauts, the first men to reach the vicinity of the moon.  She was towed to Chaarleston in 1975.

Doesn't Dave look right at home?

Fort Moultrie is the name of a series of forts on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, built to protect the city of Charleston, South Carolina. The first fort, built of palmetto logs, inspired the flag and nickname (Palmetto State) of South Carolina.  It was modernized in the 1870s, with huge rifled cannon and deep concrete bunkers; further modernization in the 1880s turned all of Sullivan's Island into a military complex, of which the old fort was just a part. The fort evolved with the times through World War II and beyond, but in recent years has been turned over to the National Park Service. The fort is now constructed as a tour backwards in time through the fort's defenses, from World War II back to the palmetto log fort of William Moultrie.

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