JEFFERSONIAN Gunboats NUMBER 137 and NUMBER 138 (Shipwreck) National Register of Historic Places Listing

Thomas Jefferson hated big navies. He thought giant frigates were expensive invitations to foreign wars, so he built cheap, small gunboats instead. A bizarre strategy. Gunboats Number 137 and Number 138 represented the peak of this experimental policy. Imagine a shallow wooden vessel, roughly 60 feet long, carrying a single massive 18- or 24-pounder cannon. The gun took up almost the entire deck. Firing it often threatened to capsize the whole boat, but they were cheap to build.

By 1814, the British Royal Navy was terrorizing the Chesapeake Bay. Commodore Joshua Barney gathered these misfit gunboats into his famous Chesapeake Flotilla to harass the enemy. It worked for a while. But then the British marched toward Washington. Barney faced a brutal choice near Pig Point, Maryland. He could let the enemy capture his ships, or he could blow them up. He chose the fire. His men set the fuses, abandoned ship, and watched their fleet blow sky-high. Number 137 and Number 138 sank straight to the muddy bottom of the Patuxent River.

Today, these two wrecks lie preserved in the oxygen-poor mud of Calvert County. That muck acted like a preservative. Actually, it saved them. Archaeologists who mapped the site found remarkably intact timber framing, ballast stones, and small personal belongings. They aren't just piles of old wood. They represent the only surviving physical remnants of Jefferson's controversial naval policy. Since no original blueprints survived, these muddy ribs of oak are the only records we have of how early shipwrights built these vessels. History buried in the river silt.