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300px-Uss Tunxis 1864

USS TUNXIS (1864)

Built: Chester, Pennsylvania

Commissioned: July 12, 1864

Service: North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, 1864

Home Port: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Dimensions: 225' Long, 45' Beam, 9' Draft

Armor: 8" iron Turret, 10" iron Pilothouse, 3" iron Hull, 3" iron Deck

'Arm'ament: 1x11" Smoothebore, 1x150lb Rifle

Engines: Single Screw

Speed: 9 knots

Crew: 69

Fate: Decommissioned, 1864. Laid up, 1866. Broken up, 1874.



Summary

Tunxis was the only one of the notorious Casco class monitors to be completed and deployed operationally with her turret before the end of the American Civil War. She appears to have been built largely to the specifications for the class, without any significant alterations.

After some time in naval yard defense and training exercises, Tunxis was dispatched on her maiden voyage, ostensibly to join the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron. She never arrived. Shortly into her voyage, she began to take on water at an alarming rate, and she turned about to return to Philadelphia. Shortly thereafter, she was decommissioned, and extensive rebuilding work was done. In 1866, Tunxis emerged from the shipyard considerably improved, and much more appropriate to the tasks for which she had been designed, but the class had attracted a bad reputation, and like most of the Casco class, she was laid up immediately. She was renamed several times before being broken up for scrap in 1874.

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