It is now possible to stare down the freshly-cleaned barrel of one the Dahlgren guns from the USS Monitor.

As we all remember, during the Civil War, the Union ironclad Monitor engaged the Confederate ironclad Virginia, formerly  the USS Merrimack, on March 9th, 1862. It went down in history as the first battle in history between ironclad battleships. Less than a year later, the Monitor sank in a storm off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

The wreck was discovered in 1973 and over the decades a few individual pieces were retrieved — the signal lantern, the anchor, personal effects — but in 2002, the Monitor‘s 120-ton gun turret was raised from the wreck site. It contained two XI-inch Dahlgren guns and their carriages.

The Dahlgren guns are 11 feet long and weigh almost eight tons. They were cast at the West Point foundry in 1859 and were originally on another warship before being transferred to the Monitor. A hundred and forty years at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean had caked it inside and outside with concretion, a rock-hard combination of corrosion materials, sediment and sea life.

On Tuesday, February 25th, conservators deployed a bespoke drill and bit designed to remove the concretion from the bore of the gun.

After some measurements, adjustments and leveling by the conservation staff,  the drill was guided forward on its track, inching it into the gun’s barrel. The drill produced a deluge of black water and some large chunks of marine concretions.

The skeletal remains of two sailors were discovered in the gun turret when it was raised in 2002.  The two sailors were buried at Arlington National Cemetery in 2013.

The second Dahlgren gun is being bored this week.

Next, to shoot them!

Via the always good History Blog.