Archaeological Investigations of Three Derelict Vessels, Savannah River Chatham County, Georgia

GAl Consultants, Inc. (GAl), conducted an archaeological field investigation of three derelict vessels in February and March, 1991, under subcontract to Gulf Engineering, for the Savannah District of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers. The vessels were located on the south shore of Hutchinson Island opposite Savannah, Georgia, on the Savannah River. One, a nineteenth-century wooden-hulled sailing ship, is believed to be the remains of the Elba, a barque built in 1863 in Pembroke, Maine, and cut down into a lighter in Savannah in 1891. The vessel had been intentionally abandoned as derelict behind the Garden Bank Training Wall sometime after the wall's construction in 1894. Another site, known as The Small Craft site, constituted the forward eight feet of a wooden-hulled gasoline launch or batteaux. The remains of this vessel were recorded through photography and measured drawings. The final site investigated by GAl consisted of an iron smokestack standing proud of the river bank. The stack was found to be attached to an iron horizontal-flue steam boiler. Probing in the vicinity of the boiler located a flat wooden surface, presumably the hull of a vessel, buried under six to eight feet of sand. Based on subsurface probing, the vessel was hypothesized to be a small river steamer, about 60 feet long (18.29 meters) with a beam of about 12 feet (3.65 meters). There is no indication from the historical record as to what specific vessel this may represent.