That Confederate Ironclad at Tarboro, NC

I first wrote aboout this on April 5th of this year.

On Saturday night, in Mt. Airy (Mayberry), NC, I ran into a brother from another mother now living in Rocky Mount, but originally from Tarboro. He was also a big Civil War nut as well as World War II and we had a great time talking about those two subjects out in the gazebo of the Mayberry Motor Inn on the Andy Griffith Parkway, old US-52 bypass.

We talked about the 11th NC Infantry regiment of which he is a reenactor and Wilmington and one thing after another. His poor wife (they were there celebrating their 7th anniversary) had to have been really bored. He was surprised about my knowledge of the 11th NC and its colonel, Collett Leventhorpe, but I have wrtten a lot about them in my Saw the Elephant Civil War blog in the past week.

Talk turned to Tarboro and its role, then I remembered writing about a Confederate ironclad being destroyed on the stocks by a Union raid in July, 1863. He also knew of the ship and we got to talking about what the name of it might have been had it gotten nearer to completion. Neither of us felt it would be named the CSS Tar, for the river it was being built on, like the CSS Neuse.

We decided most likely it would have been the CSS Pamlico for the sound the Tar River empties into (like the CSS Albemarle)at the coast.

Hey, Pamlico Has a Better Ring Than Tar. --Old B-R'er