interloper
Member
I'll apologize in advance that this is on the opposite side of the Atlantic from most of the readers of this forum. When I first saw this several years ago, I thought it was just an old drainage culvert that had found its way into the creek. A closer inspection at low tide showed that it is something else. The main tubes don't go all the way through, and there are the remains of wooden ribs poking out of the mud on either side. One end is closed off by a riveted box structure, and there is a riveted outer casing still intact around the lower part of the main tubes. It is located on Cypress Creek in Smithfield, Virginia. There is a manor house just downstream of the wreck that dates from 1750, and another manor house just upstream that dates from 1806. It is known that this section of the creek had wharves, and was served by steamboats, but there is no specific information about this wreck. I contacted the editor of the local newspaper, the Smithfield Times. He contacted the Mariners' Museum in Newport News. There is general agreement that it is a section of a wooden hull with the lower part of a Scotch boiler; however, no record has been found that identifies the vessel. The width of the hull is about equal to the length of my canoe, 17 feet. The width along with the single boiler with two-furnaces is consistent with a vessel the size of a tugboat. The tugboat Dorothy, Newport News Shipbuilding Hull #1, was built in 1890, and has a steel hull. Corrugated furnaces have been around since the late 1870s. The wreckage is probably from a wooden tug or other smaller vessel built in the 1880s. When it finished its useful life, it was probably dragged into the marsh, stripped of most of its metal parts, and burned. There was a major wharf fire in Smithfield in 1921, which put an end to the town as a center for the peanut industry. The wreck might date from that period.
