Where The Dunbar Went Down When The US Navy Conquered The Lower Tennessee

A forgotten chapter in the defeat of the Confederacy

USS Tyler, a “timberclad” gunboat of the US Navy in 1861, was nearly identical to the Conestoga due to the added timber siding, but they were not actual sister ships

Where the Elk River empties into the Tennessee River below Rogersville, Alabama, there lies a “bed of flinty rocks that overlaid or was mixed with the soft rocks on the river bed” many eons ago.¹ This 37-mile (60 km) stretch of water includes four shoals collectively known as the Great Muscle Shoals.

A canal was opened through one of the four shoals in 1836. The wooden gates of the 17 locks wore out quickly, however, while no maintenance funds had been appointed, so it was abandoned after just two years. Shallow, treacherous, with fast-moving currents, steamboats could only navigate the Great Muscle Shoals during the high-water months, December to early May, until the river was finally tamed by dams in the 20th century.

Built in the same decade, however, the Tuscumbia, Courtland, and Decatur Railroad along the southern bank of the Tennessee allowed the cotton plantations of the northern counties of Alabama to circumvent the shoals and access the Mississippi watershed. Water and rail transport thus had a complementary relationship across the heart of Dixie in 1862, and the US Navy exploited this interdependence to cleave the Confederacy in two.

On 8 February of that year, when the timberclad sidewheelers Tyler (see photo above) and Conestoga appeared under the bluffs of what is now Sheffield, Alabama, they had already wreaked havoc down the Tennessee all the way south from Kentucky. After the fall of Fort Henry to Union troops two days before, they had captured or sunk every steamboat they found, severing the Memphis & Charleston railroad bridge.

By the end of this day, the last Confederate gunboat below Muscle Shoals would be destroyed. Sailing the conquered stretch of river with impunity thereafter, both gunboats were free to make an outsize contribution to the looming Union land victories in the west. The Confederate States of America never recovered.