USS ''W. W. Burns'' was a
schooner
A schooner () is a type of sailing vessel defined by its rig: fore-and-aft rigged on all of two or more masts and, in the case of a two-masted schooner, the foremast generally being shorter than the mainmast. A common variant, the topsail schoon ...
acquired by the
United States Navy in 1861.
''W. W. Burns'' was a
wooden-
hulled Chesapeake Bay schooner acquired by the U.S. Navy on 13 August 1861 at
Baltimore
Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic, and the 30th most populous city in the United States with a population of 585,708 in 2020. Baltimore was d ...
,
Maryland for use as
stone-laden
blockship during the
American Civil War. The purchase of ''W. W. Burns'' was one of 22 made at Baltimore in the summer of 1861, and she and the other 21 ships were slated to be loaded with stone, taken to the
North Carolina coast, and sunk as
blockships off the entrances to the major
inlet
An inlet is a (usually long and narrow) indentation of a shoreline, such as a small arm, bay, sound, fjord, lagoon or marsh, that leads to an enclosed larger body of water such as a lake, estuary, gulf or marginal sea.
Overview
In marine geogra ...
s leading to
Albemarle Sound,
Pamlico Sound, and
Okracoke Sound. The venture was the first of the "
stone fleet" projects undertaken by the U.S. Navy during the Civil War, but, due to delays and other problems, it failed.
Some of the 22 ships seem to have remained at their anchorages in
Hampton Roads
Hampton Roads is the name of both a body of water in the United States that serves as a wide channel for the James River, James, Nansemond River, Nansemond and Elizabeth River (Virginia), Elizabeth rivers between Old Point Comfort and Sewell's ...
,
Virginia, and deteriorated late that summer and into the autumn of 1861. The ultimate fate of ''W. W. Burns'' is unrecorded.
References
*
Ships of the Stone Fleet
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