| On a bend in the Mississippi River, beneath the chocolate brown water, archeologists have come across a surprising find: A sunken, hulking Civil War gunship that played a heroic role in the Battle of Mobile Bay. The USS Chickasaw — brainchild of engineering genius James Buchanan Eads and Union stalwart in the Battle of Mobile Bay — was recently rediscovered in a graveyard of shipwrecks in the area known as Carrollton, once a town upriver from the French Quarter. "It was designated as shipwreck No. 2," said Duke Rivet, a state archaeologist. "They had a total of 19 shipwrecks there." The Chickasaw, which is now the only known Milwaukee class ironclad river monitor left, was put to rest in 1944 at that spot on the river, fading into memory along with other outdated and unusable vessels and barges... |