Big Step in Hunley Conservation

NORTH CHARLESTON — It has been a long, long time since anyone has seen the H.L. Hunley submarine the way it looks today.

Off the coast of Charleston in 1864, shortly after becoming the first combat submarine to complete its mission by sinking a Union ship, the Hunley and its eight-man crew went missing.

In 1995, searchers found the sub and in 2000 a team raise the vessel and began restoration work. Despite more than 500,000 visitors over that time, the view hasn’t been all that great.

So on Thursday, when crews removed a 50-foot, 17,000-pound supporting truss, researchers and the public got a first unobstructed glimpse of the sub.

“It’s a milestone,” said Kellen Correia, executive director of Friends of the Hunley. “It was raised in 2000… but when tourists came out, it was difficult to see it. It was a hard view. So this is the first time you can get an unobstructed view of the Hunley.”

Six months ago, the crew rotated the submarine to a straight 90-degree angle. Since its discovery, preservationists had conducted research and the move of the submarine at the tilted angle in which it was found.

Even for the team of researchers studying and conserving the vessel, Thursday’s milestone is groundbreaking.

“It’s like the end of an eclipse,” said Paul Mardikian, the senior conservator on the project. “Now you are seeing it the way it was meant to be.”

The ultimate goal is to find out why the crew did not return from its mission and then to display the vessel in a museum. Accomplishing both those goals appears to be several years away, though they are closer than ever before.

“We need to look under that concretion to find out what happened to that submarine,” Mardikian said. “We have leads, we have ideas … We are clearing out all the, I think, fantasies that people have had in the past about that submarine.”

It will take years, however for crews to repeatedly soak the sub in chemicals and then carefully chip away at the concretion, Mardikian said.

In 2004, the Hunley’s crew was extracted and given a full-honors burial. Getting the vessel to a museum-display quality has been one of the toughest tasks in Mardikian’s career.

“There is no textbook, there is no roadmap for how to conserve a Civil War submarine that’s been in salt water for over a century,” Mardikian said.

The restoration effort, led by Clemson University researchers, is housed in a warehouse in North Charleston on a former Navy base, roughly 10 minutes from historic downtown Charleston.  Tours are conducted on Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets are $12.