The H. L. Hunley: Born in Mobile
Near Mobile, Alabama
The most consequential weapon built in Mobile never came back here. In the summer of eighteen sixty-three, at a machine shop on Theater Street, a team of engineers and laborers assembled a hand-powered submarine for the Confederate Navy. They worked from iron boiler plate, bent and riveted into a cigar-shaped hull nearly forty feet long. The vessel was financed by a New Orleans investor named Horace Lawson Hunley, and it carried his name.
The crew of eight operated the Hunley by turning a hand crank running down the center of the boat, connected by chain to a rear propeller. Seven men cranked. One steered and managed the ballast tanks. On July thirty-first, eighteen sixty-three, the submarine was demonstrated for Admiral Franklin Buchanan in the middle of Mobile Bay, attacking a towed coal barge with a spar torpedo. The demonstration succeeded. The Confederate Navy shipped the vessel by rail to Charleston, South Carolina in August.
What happened next entered naval history. On February seventeenth, eighteen sixty-four, the Hunley approached the Union sloop of war USS Housatonic at night and detonated a torpedo against her hull. The Housatonic sank in shallow water. The Hunley became the first submarine in history to sink an enemy warship.
The Hunley never returned. It disappeared that same night and was not recovered until the year two thousand. It now rests in a conservation tank in North Charleston. Mobile built the thing that changed naval warfare. Charleston got the history marker.
