BUY Rebel Flags For SaleOver 40 years, history lover William Atteridge built more than a thousand model replicas of Civil War ships by hand. When he died, he left the entire fleet to his son Larry, who discovered that the collection was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The story was featured in a 2017 episode of Strange Inheritance with Jamie Colby on Fox Business Network.
A Lifetime of Ships
Atteridge began building models from scratch in the mid-1970s. Rather than buying kits, he researched each vessel and built it himself, working his way through the rosters of both the Union and Confederate navies. Over time, his collection grew to include ironclads, gunboats, blockade runners, steamers and sailing ships, many of them vessels most people have never heard of.
The War at Sea
The naval side of the war is often overlooked, but it was critical. At the start of the war, the Union launched a blockade of more than 3,500 miles of Southern coastline, hoping to cut off the cotton trade and starve the Confederacy of supplies. The South had almost no navy, so it had to get creative.
Blockade runners, fast and low ships that could slip past Union warships at night, brought in rifles, medicine and other supplies from Bermuda, Nassau and Havana. Confederate commerce raiders like the CSS Alabama roamed the oceans and captured or destroyed more than 60 Union merchant ships before she was sunk off Cherbourg, France, in 1864.
Ironclads and Submarines
The war also saw some of the most important inventions in naval history. On March 9, 1862, the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia fought the Union ironclad USS Monitor at Hampton Roads, Virginia, the first battle between ironclad warships. Wooden navies around the world became obsolete almost overnight.
In February 1864, the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley became the first submarine in history to sink an enemy warship when she sank the USS Housatonic off Charleston. Collections like Atteridge’s help bring these little-known stories to life.
Read more about naval history in The Rebel Monster and the Battle of the Ironclads, and browse our Confederate flag collection.
Source: Fox Business: Model Son Inherits Civil War Fleet
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