After a successful season of hands on work removing concretion from the Monitor’s Turret, conservators have cleaned the tank fitted anodes for electrolytic reduction, and added 90,000 gallons of water purified by reverse osmosis.   When the electrolyte had been added, everything was ready to begin active desalination and start the process of removing [...]

This past week, the Monitor conservation staff began screening concretion and corrosion products removed from the interior of the turret over the last 10 weeks (see previous posts and video links on the main page). As with any archaeological excavation, we want to make sure that even small objects and fragments are recovered for future [...]

This is our 100th post, and it’s an important one!  The Virginia Collections Initiative in conjunction with the Virginia Association of Museums is once again generating its list of “Virginia’s Top Ten Endangered Artifacts”.  http://www.vatop10artifacts.org/ USS Monitor‘s revolving gun turret is on the list of nominees for 2011, and we hope to be selected for [...]

The Mariners’ Museum and Monitor Conservation Project were fortunate to attract the attention of John Tierney and the New York Times.  John visited the museum on two recent occasions and published an article about the Monitor in the NY Times on August 8.  The article coincides with the 150th anniversary of the publication (in the NY [...]

In preparation for their removal from the turret, photographic documentation was undertaken to record the location and orientation of remaining roof stanchions (in situ in their mounting brackets), which once supported a canvas canopy above the turret.  In the photograph below taken in July of 1862, you can see the starboard side of the turret in [...]

Time flies… the last blog update about the wool coat was April 30th of 2010! Since then, a significant part of the garment’s conservation treatment was completed. The coat is now clean, dry and thoroughly documented! Prior to freeze-drying, each one of the 138 pieces of wool were drawn for the record as well as [...]

This is a nice shot by Jason from photography of the three recently conserved Dahlgren gun tools: a sponge on the left, a Robinson worm in the middle, and a shot ladle on the right. Handling the objects during the photo session reminded us of how fit the gunners had to be to do their [...]

Inside the Monitor’s turret there are a series of thin wrought iron plates that covered the rows of nuts and bolts that held together the turret armor. The purpose of these plates was to prevent the nuts from breaking off of the bolts and flying around inside the turret when the armor took a hard [...]

A while ago, conservators, archaeologists, shipyard employees, and a corrosion expert removed a core sample from Monitor‘s revolving gun turret armor. Although long-term analysis is ongoing, yesterday we utilized a portable XRF analyzer to perform additional elemental analysis. We’ll let you know what our results are after we have a chance to review them. In [...]

Elsa and Laura are treating fragments of a wool coat recovered from the turret. The coat would be similar to a 4-button pilot coat, and was made of dark blue felted wool. Below, Elsa is pointing out a button hole and a pocket opening in the coat. Even after 140 years on the sea-floor, some [...]