CSS Albemarle: The Cornfield Ironclad

Six hundred feet north of here, in the Roanoke River, Union forces sank one of the most improbable warships of the Civil War. The CSS Albemarle was hammered together in a cornfield at Edwards Ferry from raw iron and green timber while the war raged around it. Commander James W.

Cooke launched her in April eighteen sixty-four, immediately ramming the Union gunboat Southfield and helping Confederate forces retake Plymouth. For months the ironclad terrorized Federal squadrons in the Albemarle Sound, surviving massed broadsides from a flotilla of Union gunboats. Her end came on the night of October twenty-seventh, eighteen sixty-four, when Lieutenant William Cushing piloted a small torpedo launch through the darkness and detonated a charge beneath her hull.

The Confederates evacuated Plymouth four days later. The Union Navy later raised her from the river, and she was sold and probably scrapped.