Pilot’s jacket recovered from USS Monitor conserved

A jacket recovered from the USS Monitor, which sank in 1862, is set to go on display at the USS Monitor Center in Virginia after conservation efforts are complete.

Found inside the vessel’s famous gun turret not long after it was recovered from the Atlantic in August 2002, the rumpled expanse of Navy blue cloth had to be chiseled and coaxed from the grasp of the thick marine concretion that entrapped it — a painstaking process that took archaeologists and conservators from the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary and Mariners’ Museum several days.

But that was only the start of a decade-long treatment program that included hundreds of hours of tedious yet precise manual labor as conservators used ultrasonic dental scalers to break down the concretions embedded between the fragile fibers.

[Full story]

Story: Mark St. John Erickson | Photo: The Mariners’ Museum