In July of 1863, three days after the Battle of Gettysburg, a small postal boat sailing down the Ohio River between Kentucky and Indiana sent out a distress call. A nearby Union naval vessel, the newly completed Alice Dean, responded.
That vessel in distress was an ambush.
The boat had been captured by Confederate soldiers under the command of Gen. John Hunt Morgan. The Confederates were able to subdue the Union soldiers on board and used both the postal boat and the Alice Dean to ferry troops from Kentucky into Indiana.
This offensive became known as Morgan's Raid and would continue through Corydon, Salem, and Vienna, only to end a few days later in Ohio with Morgan's defeat and capture.
But before Morgan's raiders ventured into Indiana, they burned the Alice Dean, sinking it to the bottom of the Ohio River.
And despite over 150 years of recovery efforts, parts of the ship still straddle the border between Indiana and Kentucky.
It's a shipwreck site that Charles Beeker, director of Indiana University's Center of Underwater Science, wants to study and preserve. He wants to gather more information to turn the site into what he calls a living museum. "We're thinking of them as underwater cultural resources, underwater cultural heritage, maritime landscapes, in the context of the ship being part of the landscape," Beeker said.
He also hopes new funding from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources will help establish that living museum to preserve this piece of Indiana's maritime history. "They don't make many more historic shipwrecks," said Beeker.
Grants to preserve history
The DNR's Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology announced last week it is awarding 12 grants to projects around the state focused on preserving local history.
The grants will fund projects that range from masonry repair on historic buildings in South Bend, Cannelton, Terre Haute, and Plymouth to funding a study in New Harmony, a request for federal recognition for a site in Fort Wayne, and the Ohio River shipwreck.
The state is contributing $656,000, with matching funds coming from the federal government. In the end more than $1.2 million will go towards projects across the state.
The Department of Natural Resources is accepting public comments on all projects until the end of the calendar year.
You can see information about all projects to receive funding in the document embedded below:
Contact WFYI Digital Producer and Reporter Jeremy Reuben at jreuben@wfyi.org
