USS MASSACHUSETTS--BB-2 (shipwreck) National Register of Historic Places Listing

The USS Massachusetts (BB-2) represents the raw, clunky dawn of the modern steel American Navy. Commissioned in 1896, this Indiana-class beast carried massive thirteen-inch guns designed to pummel Spanish warships. She fought off Cuba. But technology moved too fast. By 1921, the Navy considered her obsolete junk, so they towed her to the shallow waters off Pensacola Pass. Fort Pickens gunners used her for target practice. They blasted her hull with double-breech artillery until she sank.

Today, the wreck sits in just thirty feet of water. A jagged playground of steel. In 1993, Florida designated the site as an underwater archaeological preserve, and the federal government added it to the National Register in 2001. Divers love it. They swim through the collapsed superstructure to touch gun turrets and massive boiler tubes now encrusted with brine and barnacles. Gulf storms constantly shift the sand. One year the stern is entirely exposed, and the next it is swallowed up again. It remains a raw, heavy piece of naval history you can practically touch from the Pensacola shoreline.