Boom! Goes the USS Commodore Jones...

5fish

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Encounter on the James River, near City Point, with the Union ironclad gunboat, the Commodore Jones, destroyed by a Confederate electronic torpedo,...

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The Confederate Submarine Battery Service made extensive use of torpedoes (mines) against U.S. vessels in this area, including sinking the USS Commodore Jones on May 6, 1864. An observer noted: “It seemed as if the bottom of the river was torn up and blown through the vessel itself.”

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USS Commodore Jones was a Union side-wheel gunboat of 542 bulk tons and measured 154 x 32.6 x 11.8 feet. She had a complement of max. 103 and was armed with 1 x 9-inch Dahlgren, 1 x 50-pounder Dahlgren, 2 x 30-pounder Parrotts and 3 x 24-pounder smoothbores. USS Commodore Jones was originally a ferryboat converted for the Navy in 1863 at New York City. Around midnight on May 6th, 1864, USS Commmodre Jones hit a very powerfull, electrically ignited 2.000 pound Confederate mine and 69 were killed, 250 feet from shore, near the Confederate Point batteries just across Fourmile Creek off Jones Point opposite Sturgeontown at Deep Bottom. Underwater Archaeological work in 1985 found a magnetic anomaly in the area, but no wreck Read more at wrecksite: https://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?219456

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USS Commodore Jones was a ferryboat acquired by the Union Navy during the American Civil War. Ferryboats were of great value, since, because of their flat bottom and shallow draft, they could navigate streams and shallow waters that other ships could not. She was outfitted by the Union Navy as a heavily armed gunboat and assigned to the blockade of the waterways of the Confederate States of America

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USS Commodore Jones, a 542-ton (burden) shallow-draft side-wheel gunboat, was built at New York City in 1863 as a civilian ferryboat. She was purchased by the Navy, converted for armed Civil War service, and placed in commission in May 1863. Of a type suitable for operations in sheltered waters, Commodore Jones primarily spent her brief career in James and other southern Virginia rivers that feed into Chesapeake Bay. She took part in a raid up the Mattapony River in early June that destroyed a foundry producing weapons for the Confederacy. Later in the month she briefly went to sea to search for the raider Tacony and in mid-July 1863 assisted in the capture of Fort Powhatan, on the James. After hardly a year's active service, on 6 May 1864 USS Commodore Jones was blown "to splinters" by a very large electrically-fired mine during operations on the James River.



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The squadron’s respite ended in May 1864 when a formidable naval flotilla steamed up the James along with the Union Army of the James. (The offensive was part of the new Union general-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant‘s Overland Campaign against Richmond that eventually stalled in a ten-month siege of Petersburg.) A Confederate torpedo destroyed the Union gunboat, the USS Commodore Jones, on May 6 and stalled the Union flotilla. Confederate Navy secretary Stephen Mallory ordered James River Squadron commander Captain John K. Mitchell to engage the enemy, but Mitchell had little confidence in his chances and declined to act.

From late in May 1864 to early in April 1865, the opposing naval forces faced each other across barriers of obstructions and torpedoes and dramatic bends in the James River below Chaffin’s Bluff—a situation mirroring the armies’ confrontations within trench lines. Acting in concert with the land batteries (several of which were manned by naval personnel), the squadron worked to prevent Union forces from crossing the river behind Confederate lines and looked for opportunities to move against the enemy.
 
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