In the Weeds

By fStop Fitzgerald | 21 May 2021

This is why I still have film in the freezer from the 1980 Lake Placid Olympic Winter Games.

I am doing a full-ship cutaway drawing of the Civil War ironclad USS demonstrably Cairo.

The first ironclad gunboat built in the United States was **http://spidercreative.co.uk/project-tag/maps/ Saint Louis**, ca. 1862. She was a sister ship of **Cairo**.

The riverine gunboat had a life of just two and a half months with the US Navy from 1 October to 12 December 1862. She had, however, been commissioned into the US Army on 25 January 1862 until her transfer to the Navy that fall. Cairo had the ignominy of being the first warship ever sunk by a remotely detonated mine (called a torpedo in Civil War parlance).

Her salvage from the bottom of the Yazoo River began in 1960 and her remains are on display at the USS Cairo Museum outside Vicksburg, Mississippi. [https://www.nps.gov/vick/u-s-s-cairo-gunboat.htm]

The illustration is being done for a book by Dwight S. Hughes on the Western Waters gunboats. Previously we worked together on a book about the Monitor and Virginia: Unlike Anything That Ever Floated: The Monitor and Virginia and the Battle of Hampton Roads, March 8–9, 1862. [https://www.amazon.com/Unlike-Anything-That-Ever-Floated/dp/1611215250]

Work has progressed well. Here are several iterations of the hull structure.

The other internals are coming along as well: the engines, boilers, wheel, and “doctor” engine. Guns and their carriages have been built.

In going over the drawings looking for missing details, I found the stove which has little depiction other than a box. Other drawings revealed nothing more. What did this thing look like?

I started poking around on the web looking for the “Cairo stove.” Quickly I hit on a site for South Bend Replicas in Indiana [https://southbendreplicas.com]. I pinged the owner, Jim Olson, who very quickly responded to my request for help. His company had built a replica of the stove working from the original and very badly disfigured remains.

Ideally, of course, it would have been nice to work from Jim’s drawings. Sadly, however, they had been lost in a 100-year flood a few years back. He did everything he could to help be especially by sharing a number of photographs from which to work. One set had the remains marked up in measurements, which was a God-send. While my finished stove may not be 100 percent accurate, it is more than just a ballpark guess.

The remains of the original stove with its measured markings.

An interesting point about the original stove is that it was named the “Southern Belle No. 5.” Kind of enigmatic for a Union ship.

Jim Olson with his completed reproduction.

The stove overall and another reproduction in full use.

An interesting design aspect is that the wood fuel and grate are on the right. You see the firebox door at the top (with the Southern Belle name plate) and at the bottom is the ash drawer. Notice the rivet pattern at the top of the oven. The oven’s top was curved a few inches below the top plate. The heat rises from the grate, arches over the top of the oven, goes down the left side (in these views), and across the bottom. It exits at the bottom back and goes up the chimney. Jim said that when it was in full operation, they could pull off one of the top deck plates (there are four, each with their own pot plates), and the draft was so strong that nothing escaped above the stove. Pretty amazing.

This is the firebox door above the stove’s medallion.

Two looks at my version of the original.

Jim is generous beyond words. He spent far too much time on my little project and provided a wealth of information and answered everyone of my inane questions as if they were intelligent. Beyond this, he sent me a six-pound copy of the stove’s medallion, which he had cast for his reproductions. This was made from the stove’s original, so I have a Kevin Bacon one degree of separation!

. . . and the illustration’s version.