Layer in 1863, he was placed in charge of an ambitious project to construct twenty light-draft monitors for use in shallow inland waters. Unfortunately, the displacement calculations made for these ships were badly done. The resulting Casco-class turned out to be useless for their intended role and had to be extensively modified.
Stimers had inadvertantly demonstrated the inherent difficulty of successfully shepherding complex technological endeavors, something that had bedeviled "project managers" from his time to ours.
After the Casco-class debacle, Stimers returned to the seagoing Navy. At the beginning of 1865, he was Chief Engineer of the steam frigate USS Wabash. (As such, he likely was at Fort Fisher.)
He resigned from the Navy in August 1865 and became a consultant.
He died of smallpox on June 3, 1876, survived by a wife and five children.
--Old B-Runner
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