Charleston P&C: Sunken vessels from Civil War Union blockade interfere with proposed beach resourishment
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Wreckage from sunken Civil War blockade ships off Isle of Palms create another renourishment hurdle
- By Anna Sharpe ash...@postandcourier.com
- Feb 3, 2026
ISLE OF PALMS — Although two Civil War-era shipwrecks that sit a mile off the coast of the barrier island aren’t a new discovery, they present another hurdle for the city as the start date for work on a large-scale renourishment project approaches.
It hasn't been smooth sailing for the Isle of Palms as the city prepares for the $32 million project.
City leaders are already facing a $10 million funding gap for the work, and they hope to avoid dipping into tourism accounts to fill it.
Project leaders with Coastal Science and Engineering, the city’s contracted firm leading the renourishment work, say they’re facing new challenges, too, with updated restrictions from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service around turtle and seabird nesting season that could impact when and where construction takes place.
Wreck of blockade-runner near the shore of Sullivan's Island.
Library of Congress/Provided
On top of all that, the city’s coastal engineers in charge of the upcoming beach renourishment must maneuver around the wreckage sites to access the necessary 1.7 million cubic yards of sand offshore.
Shipwrecks the result of Union blockade
The wreckage is what remains of an attempt by Union powers to block Confederate ships from running the Charleston Harbor during the Civil War called the Stone Fleets.
In the early 1860s, Union forces bought dozens of former whaling and merchant ships, weighed them down with heavy stone and granite and scuttled them — sinking them intentionally in a checkerboard pattern.
James Spirek, an underwater archaeologist with the University of South Carolina’s Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, surveyed the wreckage of the Stone Fleet in 2013.
The crook of an iron-staple knee, part of the structure support for a Stone Fleet ship, lies on top a ball at mound on the bottom offshore Isle of Palms.
South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina/Provided
“These obstructions were intended to frustrate the passage of blockade runners bringing war material and other sundry products from Europe and returning laden with cotton, rice and naval stores,” Spirek wrote in a 2013 survey report about the Stone Fleet.
The hope was that the scuttled ships would bolster the small number of vessels tasked with enforcing the blockade, according to reports from the Maritime Research Division at USC.
Thirteen of those vessels were sunk as part of the Second Stone Fleet, their masts stripped down and some set ablaze as they sank.
These ships were meant to block the entrance to the harbor and cut off access as ships tried to make their way through Maffitt’s Channel, the channel into the harbor near Sullivan’s Island.
The strategy was ultimately regarded as ineffective. Quick-shifting sands and strong tides destroyed many of the sunken ships.
“The ships broke apart and pieces washed ashore, a new channel supposedly scoured out, and blockade runners bypassed the obstructions with minimal diversion,” Spirek wrote in his 2013 survey report.
But some Confederate ships succumbed to the blockade and the Stone Fleet.
In 1863, a 205-foot-long Scottish-built ship called the Georgiana was spotted by the Union blockaders. The ship would have had to navigate the Second Stone Fleet while trying to quietly slip into the harbor unnoticed — an attempt that ended in Union gunfire.
The sinking of the Georgiana was reported as a “disaster” in the Charleston Mercury, the newspaper that wrote of the incident in 1863.
The captain ran the ship aground on the Isle of Palms, then called Long Island Beach, to evade capture, the paper reported. It was further destroyed by Union forces and stripped of its contents, which consisted of ammunition, rifles and battle axes.
About a year later, another blockade runner called the Mary Bowers hit the remains of the Georgiana. Sonar images show the ships are situated in the shape of an ‘X,’ with the Mary Bowers sitting on top of the Georgiana, roughly five feet below the surface at low tide.
This sonar image presented to Isle of Palms City Council in August 2025 shows the wreckage of the Georgiana and the Mary Bowers.
Provided
Wreckage presents a new challenge
Today the two ships, along with remnants of the Second Stone Fleet, are also situated within an ideal borrow site for the island’s beach renourishment projects. Renourishment is completed with the use of long pipes, which take sediment from offshore and pump the material onto the beach.
The sand here is compatible with the Isle of Palms shores, and there’s plenty of it — enough to last 30 or 40 years, city council learned last summer.
The shipwrecks are valuable cultural resources and regarded as such by the State Historic Preservation Office. But their location—smack dab in the middle of a plethora of fresh sand for the deeply eroded island—means crews will need to work around them in order to dredge sand.
The Stone Fleet which sailed from New Bedford Nov. 16, 1861.
Library of Congress/Provided
It’s an issue that engineers ran into while gearing up for the 2018 renourishment on the island. But additional research into the shipwrecks, and advancements of sonar imaging, have helped get a clearer picture of the wreckage.
These advances allow crews to get closer to the shipwrecks and retrieve the necessary 1.7 million cubic yards of sand offshore for the upcoming renourishment work.
“It's a cultural resource, and so we're working with (the State Historic Preservation Office) to avoid those areas. Previously ... that whole area was off limits,” Patrick Barrineau, a coastal science with CSE, told city council last summer. “It frees us up from a lot of previous restrictions that we've experienced off IOP.”
Project leaders anticipate work could start on June 1 or earlier, with construction ending in the winter.
In this timeframe, the city will more than likely have to juggle the beach-wide construction while managing peak tourist season — another hoop for the Isle of Palms to jump through as the island tries to recover from widespread erosion.
Anna Sharpe covers Mount Pleasant, Isle of Palms, Sullivan's Island and Folly Beach for the Post and Courier. She graduated from Winthrop University. She previously wrote for the Moultrie News in Mount Pleasant.