USS Westfield

Project Sponsors: The site was excavated in 2009 under the direction of the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) Underwater Archaeology Branch (UA) as part of a project to expand the Houston Ship Channel. The ship is owned by the US Navy and is currently under the stewardship of the NHHC-UAB.

Time period: 1862-1863 (American Civil War)

Conservation: 2009-2017

Exhibit: Texas City Museum

Site History and Fieldwork

Westfield was a Staten Island ferryboat that was purchased by the Navy and converted into an ironclad. Under the command of Commander William B. Renshaw, Westfield supported Commander Portar’s Mortar Flotilla in the lower Mississippi River before taking up the duty of blockading the coast of Texas as a unit of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron. In October 1862, Union forces captured Galveston. During the Battle of Galveston in January 1863, Westfield ran aground and Renshaw ordered the ship be destroyed to prevent enemy capture; he and several crew died when the explosives detonated sooner than expected.

The remains of Westfield lay in a busy shipping channel with limited visibility for divers. Excavation was largely conducted using a barge crane with magnet and clamshell attachments. Archaeologists systematically sorted through the materials deposited on the barge, and those selected for conservation were sent to the CRL.

Conservation Highlights

Though both CSS Georgia and USS Westfield were scuttled to prevent enemy capture, the crew of Georgia were simply able to stop the engines, while the crew of Westfield had to detonate the ship, and the artifacts reflect the difference. At the start of the project, no one would have thought the thousands of iron fragments could come together cohesively, but then-graduate students Justin Parkoff and Jessica Stika worked together to examine the artifacts and conduct archival research to tell Westfield’s story.

Boiler

Ironclads, and the boilers that powered them, were an important engineering accomplishment, and records of them are kept in various archives. Seeing that many of the conserved artifacts resembled diagrams and photographs of Westfield’s sister ships from archival records, Parkoff worked with fellow graduate students to develop a 3D model of the boiler; he used the 3D model, a scale model, and the artifacts themselves to determine the exact dimensions of Westfield’s boiler and the approximate locations of the various artifacts.

Seeing the possibilities, the idea of a USS Westfield exhibit grew, with the boiler as one of the centerpieces. CRL staff and outside contractors worked together to build a portion of the boiler: one half made of wood to resemble what the original boiler front would have looked like, and one half made of a wire frame with the original artifacts attached. The boiler and many other artifacts are currently exhibited at the Texas City Museum.

Although putting the shot and sabots together in the box makes for some great photos, for transportation and long-term storage, all of the components were packed separately.

Condiment Shaker Cap

This cap is a great example of why you can’t judge an artifact by its concreted shape: it is only because of the X-ray that conservators saw the cap next to the bolt and assigned it a high priority for treatment. It was removed with air scribes, then further cleaned with hand tools to decrease the chance of scratching or other damage.

Metal analysis with a Bruker Tracer XRF indicated it is electroplated silver on pewter. It was carefully rinsed in baths of sodium sesquicarbonate until the salt contents were under 10ppm, then cleaned in baths of boiling deionized water and polished using sodium bicarbonate paste. Since there was a small amount of copper in the pewter, it was immersed in benzotriazole, common in copper treatments, then sealed with clear acrylic paint.

The cap has no makers mark on it, but it does have a strong resemblance to an electroplated cruet set made in 1861 by the Meriden Britannia Company from Meriden Connecticut.

Cotton Bale Ties

Faced with the ironclads of the Union Navy, and lacking the raw resources to match them, the Confederate Navy used their resources creatively and developed the cottonclad: wooden ships protected with layers of cotton bales that could absorb the force of enemy fire. Two cottonclads, CS Bayou City and CS Neptune, played key roles in the Battle of Galveston in January 1863, where USS Westfield was blown up to prevent capture by Confederate forces.

These wrought iron ties may have been present on USS Westfield, or could have come off one of the cottonclad ships in the vicinity of the wreck. This assemblage arrived fully covered in concretion, and while some ties survived relatively intact, most had majorly degraded in their time under water. Conservators cleaned out the iron corrosion from inside the concretion and poured in epoxy to create a cast. The ones with iron remaining were treated using electrolytic reduction. These were invaluable for identification, with the most intact ones appearing nearly identical to a cotton bale tie patent by J.J. McComb of New Orleans, filed in January 1861.

Cartridge Plate

These plates, attached to cartridge boxes to keep the flap shut, were typically stamped brass plates with metal attachments that were then filled with lead. Individual states created their own plates, and the federal government issued the common plate, stamped with the letters “US” like the one featured today. Belt plates of the same design only differed in the attachment method. Confederate troops sometimes re-used U.S. plates, worn upside down, as they could not always furnish their own. As the Civil War progressed, both sides were unable to furnish troops with the necessary plates, and there was a decrease in their use.

Only traces of the brass plate remains on the cartridge plates from USS Westfield, and the attachments have corroded away too, but the lead has retained the original shape.

This plate was partially covered in concretion – perhaps from the presence of corroding iron attachments. Once removed, the plate was conserved using electrolytic reduction.