Being a history buff and major, totally cool that the public can finally view this full-on. Tiny little thing the Hunley was, I think the Japanese mini-subs in WW2 have been the only things smaller. 8 friggin people fit inside the Hunley.

Complete Civil War submarine unveiled for first time - Yahoo! News

 

Very cool. I watched a show, I think on the History Channel, of the raising of the sub.

Some friends of mine used to live close to Williamsport, MD, which is fairly close to the Antietam battlefield. There's a house a couple miles from theirs that housed soldiers either just before or after the battle. The owners of the house have never painted over where the soldiers scraped their names & date into the woodwork. I was looking through a home buyers guide there and saw an old farmhouse up for sale that was used as a hospital just after the battle.

 

Yeah, I remember hearing about that house when I visited Antietam about 15 years ago while riding the C&O Canal on a bike. Of course living right here just a few hundred yards from the main part of Wilderness Battlefield is cool in it's own right at times, eery in others.

Of course the Hunley has gotten very little press over the years. Everyone knows more about the Monitor and Merrimac which were built like subs but stayed on the surface.

 

I've only been to one battlefield and that was Antietam. Just being there gave me the weirdest feelings - simply unexplainable.

A woman I used to work with went to Antietam with her family when she was young. While they were there, they were taking pictures with a Kodak 110 camera (you remember those). She said that when they got the pictures developed, all of them were perfect in color and such except for one area of the battlefield - Bloody Lane (where the soldiers were killed in the depression of the road). She said that every single picture from that area were a sepia color, almost identical to what you'd see in the original photo's. She said none of her family has set foot on another battlefield after that.

 

I am glad that the general public can now view the sub. I remember reading about it when they first found it. I would love to see it in person.

 

Crazy to think they put 8 people inside the Hunley and 7 of those were the prop guys. It was manually driven thru the water, I can't imagine having any room in there. I saw a drawing of what it would look like with all 8 inside. It would be like stuffing 8 men inside the cab of a truck, no room at all, lot's of man touching going on. Once you got inside that was it, you stayed put as one of the 7 prop guys.

 

It would certainly have been cozy. I wonder how they managed to set a torpedo with everyone in the crew, other than one, having to man the props?

 

The torpedo was attached to the front of the sub. To place it, they rammed the other ship with the sub. Once set, they reversed the sub's direction, which left the torpedo on the ship.

 

That had to be very dangerous.

 

Well, they could only move at about 4 knots tops, not like they are really ramming it very hard. It was a Spar Torpedo and it usually had a barb on it so that when rammed/shoved, into a ship, it would stay put. Remember, ships back then were normally made of wood. At that point, very few ships consisted of metal or iron like they do today. The sub would then move away and "light" the fuse from a distance. Wonder how silent this thing was, I could see it very quietly sneaking up on one of ours if it moved at half it's top speed.

Speaking of house's where soldiers scribbled their names:Uncovering 1860s graffiti; in Culpeper, an expert turns the clock back to Civil War - The News Desk