The USS Monitor was the United States' first ironclad warship. She made history at the Battle of Hampton Roads in 1862 before meeting her demise in a winter storm at the end of that year.
The story of the Monitor can be traced back to 1861, when Virginia seceded from the United States during the Civil War. As Union forces retreated from Gosport Navy Yard in Virginia, they burned one of the most powerful wooden warships in the Navy, the USS Merrimack to prevent her falling into Confederate hands.
The Confederates, desperate to build a Navy that could challenge the superiority of they enemy raised the Merrimack and converted her into an ironclad-- the CSS Virginia.
This threat prompted the U.S. to produce the Monitor in less than 100 days. The ship launched on January 30, 1862, and less than two months later, the Monitor met the Virginia on March 9, 1862, during the Battle of Hampton Roads.
And it was a good thing the Monitor took so little time to launch because it arrived just in the nick of time to prevent the Virginia from destroying the Union fleet on the second day of battle. The battle between the two ironclads ended in a draw, neither ship could hurt the other.
--Old B-Runner
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