The CSS Georgia was built in 1862 in Savannah. original plans do not exist, so historians have little more than contradictory contemporary accounts on which to rely.
But era engravings as well as eyewitness descriptions suggest the warship was 160 feet in length, with a beam of 55 feet and a ten-foot draft. A single smokestack was on top.
A double layer of interlocked railroad iron weighing more than 1,500 pounds was fixed atop 15 inches of solid timber and covered with cement filled with iron filings. The 24-foot iron walls rested at a 45-degree slope.
The ship was scuttled on Dec. 20, 1864, as General William T. Sherman's Union troops seized Savannah, the city the Georgia was built to defend. Its watery grave is roughly five miles from Savannah off Old Fort Jackson on the north edge of the Savannah Harbor navigation channel.
--Old B-Runner
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