While shipbuilding concerns and machine works like the Park & Lyons Machine Shop in Mobile, Alabama were busy creating an underwater terror known colloquially as a “fishboat,” there were others whose trip to fame and riches lay along a different path.

One such person was Dr. St. Julien Ravenel of Charleston, SC. Ravenel was a scion of Charleston’s well-known Ravenel family. A physician by avocation, Ravenel also taught at the local medical school, being Demonstrator of Anatomy. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Ravenel enlisted as an Army private, participating as such in the siege of Fort Sumter. Within a year’s time, his skill as a physician found him quickly promoted as an officer. Ravenel was then tapped for  the position as Director of the Confederate Hospital, in the South Carolina state capital of Columbia.

At the start of the American Civil War, the Confederacy was faced with an almost insurmountable problem.

Using its navy, the United States was able to blockade trade, not only through coastal ports, but also the necessary interstate riverine trade on the South’s crisscrossing network of rivers, canals and lakes. For a predominately-agricultural nation like the Confederate States of America whose existence depended on unobstructed internal and overseas trade, a naval blockade was a threat to the nation’s existence.  

Attempting to construct a national navy matching on a ship-for-ship basis the already-existing one of the northern states, would quickly bankrupt the fledgling Southern government.

In July, 1862, Union General George McClellan’s Peninsular Campaign came to its ignominious end on the banks of the James River, as his Army of the Potomac huddled under the protection of the US Navy’s guns at Harrison’s Landing.

Little Mac’s version of the West Point “Turning Movement,” conceived (but not performed) in grand Napoleonic style was beaten by Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, using the resurgent Army of Northern Virginia in a turning movement of their own and saving the Confederacy’s capital of Richmond in the process.

Almost un-noticed in the campaign’s finish was the end of the abortive Appomattox River Raid. Commodore John Rodgers discovered that warships armored and laden with heavy guns are no good if the river they are fighting in is low on water.

I propose to you a new arm of war, as formidable as it is economical.

Submarine navigation, which has been sometimes attempted, but as all know without results, owing to want of suitable opportunities, is now a problematical thing no more.”

(French nautical designer Brutus de Villeroi, in a letter to U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.)

Though the “H.L. Hunley” is widely known as the first submarine to sink an enemy warship in combat, it was by no means the only submarine to come out of the American Civil War. The construction team headed by James McClintock and Baxter Watson who built the “Hunley” had already completed and tested two other designs for underwater vessels. Though there were other designs created and built south of the Mason-Line, they were by no means the only submersibles being built in North America in the 1860’s.

After visiting Director Kellen Butler at the Lasch Conservation Center and seen the H.L. Hunley itself being painstakingly and lovingly restored, I needed to learn more about the locations  where those involved in unleashing the Hunley upon the Union Navy blockading Charleston Harbor did their good work.