During the afternoon of January 16 and much of the following day, Confederates boarded the Columbia to salvage anything they could. During that time the USS Cambridge and Penobscot remained on station and shelled them. With a Confederate flag flying defiantly over the ship, they continued until everything of use was stripped off it.
They then burned what was left of the ship.
In May 1909, the Wilmington (N.C.) Dispatch reported that the wreck of the Columbia was still visible in the water a few hundred yards from the Lumina. In the late 1970s, underwater archaeologists detected a large iron anomaly deep in the sand near the Masonboro Inlet jetty, which were later identified as the shipwreck of the Columbia.
--Old B-Runner
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