The Gunboat Philadelphia
Unknown, built by the Continental Army at Skenesborough, New York · 1776
A wooden warship the length of a bus fills a large room on the third floor, its timbers dark and roughly hewn, its short mast rising to the ceiling, a bow gun still mounted. It is the Philadelphia, a gondola-style gunboat of the Continental Army, built in the summer of 1776 at Skenesborough on Lake Champlain and sunk that October at the Battle of Valcour Island, when Benedict Arnold's small improvised fleet fought a British squadron to slow its advance from Canada. The Americans lost the battle but gained a year, which many historians think made the victory at Saratoga in 1777 possible.
The boat is astonishingly complete. It went down in cold, deep fresh water and lay on the bottom for a hundred and fifty-nine years, which preserved the hull and most of the fittings. Look at the flat bottom and open deck, which explain how quickly it was built by untrained soldiers, and at the two smaller guns at the sides. The twenty-four-pound cannonball that sank it is displayed with the wreck, still where it lodged in the hull. Around the room are hundreds of objects found on board: cooking pots, buttons, shot, tools and the crew's shoes.
A salvage engineer named Lorenzo Hagglund found the Philadelphia in 1935, raised it, and toured it around Lake Champlain on a barge before it came to the Smithsonian in 1961, when this building was under construction. The gunboat was installed before the walls were finished and cannot be removed, so it is one of the few objects here that has never left. It anchors the military history exhibition, which runs from the colonial wars through the Revolution, the Civil War, both world wars, Vietnam and the conflicts of the twenty-first century.
Did You Know? The cannonball that sank the Philadelphia in 1776 is displayed beside the hull, still where it lodged.
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