USS Aroostook (1861)
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USS Aroostook in Chinese waters, circa 1867-69.
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| History | |
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 United States
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| Name: | USS Aroostook |
| Builder: | N. L. Thompson (Kennebunk, ME) |
| Cost: | $100,500 |
| Launched: | About 19 Oct 1861 |
| Commissioned: | 20 Feb 1862 |
| Decommissioned: | 18 Sep 1869 |
| Struck: | 1869 (est.) |
| Nickname(s): | Old Rooster |
| Fate: | Sold, Hong Kong, October 1869 |
| General characteristics | |
| Class and type: | Unadilla-class gunboat |
| Displacement: | 691 tons |
| Tons burthen: | 507 |
| Length: | 158 ft (48 m) (waterline) |
| Beam: | 28 ft (8.5 m) |
| Draft: | 9 ft 6 in (2.90 m) (max.) |
| Depth of hold: | 12 ft (3.7 m) |
| Propulsion: | 2 × 200 IHP 30-in bore by 18 in stroke horizontal back-acting engines; single screw |
| Sail plan: | Two-masted schooner |
| Speed: | 10 kn (11.5 mph) |
| Complement: | 114 |
| Armament: |
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USS Aroostook was a Unadilla-class gunboat built for the Union Navy during the American Civil War. Aroostook was used by the Navy to patrol navigable waterways of the Confederacy to prevent the South from trading with other countries.
Aroostook -- a wooden-hulled, steam-propelled, screw gunboat—was laid down by Nathaniel Lord Thompson sometime soon after 6 July 1861, at Kennebunk, Maine; launched on or around 19 October 1861; and commissioned at the Boston Navy Yard on 20 February 1862, Lt. John C. Beaumont in command.
On 1 March 1862, toward the end of the gunboat's fitting out process, word reached the yard that, during a fierce storm, USS Vermont had lost her rudder, her bower anchors, all of her rigging, and four of her boats and was drifting helplessly amid raging seas some 95 miles south-southeast of Cape Cod Light. Capt. William L. Hudson, the commandant of the yard, ordered Beaumont to proceed in Aroostook to the vicinity where the disabled ship of the line had last been seen and, upon finding Vermont, to stand by her until other aid arrived.
After getting underway on 2 March, Aroostook located the distressed vessel on the 7th and then lay to, shielding Vermont from the wind. During the ensuing week, Aroostook lost her smokestack and suffered other damage. On the 15th, after the steamer Saxon arrived on the scene and relieved her, Aroostook headed for the Delaware capes.
The gunboat entered the Philadelphia Navy Yard on the 23d and, following repair of her storm damage and the installation of a new smoke stack, she headed for the Virginia Capes on the last day of March and entered Hampton Roads on 2 April.
The preceding month had been the most dramatic in the history of that busy anchorage. CSS Virginia—the scuttled and burnt screw frigate Merrimack, raised and rebuilt as a Southern ironclad ram—had made her deadly foray into that roadstead and destroyed the frigate Congress and Cumberland, originally a frigate but cut down to a razee sloop of war. The next day, the novel and plucky Union ironclad Monitor had challenged and checked Virginia when the dreaded Confederate warship reentered Hampton Roads to finish off the remaining Union blockading squadron.
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Wikipedia