U.S.S. Chattanooga possibly located by UTC class

CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee (WDEF) – Some UTC students and a professor may have discovered history dating back to the Civil War.

“I told them from the very beginning, it’s called surveying. It’s not called finding,” said Smith.

UTC Anthropology assistant professor Morgan Smith and his class had a special class project, surveying for the U.S.S. Chattanooga shipwreck.

“Just very strange to me that this one was sitting right in downtown Chattanooga and the state did not have any record of it,” said Smith.

During that search, they found what he says is likely wreckage of the U.S.S. Chattanooga, a ship bringing supplies to U.S. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s army outside Chattanooga in 1863 in the bottom of the Tennessee River.

“I am reasonably confident it is the Chattanooga. What we have now is a wreck that matches the historic location of where we last known location of the Chattanooga to be. It matches the dimensions of the Chattanooga,” said Smith.

Smith’s underwater anthropology class learned the U.S.S. Chattanooga was made up of salvaged parts of other ships and the search was meant as a unique opportunity.

“We want to do something fun but also something practical and in underwater archaeology, nine times out of 10 students are getting jobs in this kind of field they’re going to be doing exactly what we were doing that day when we found the shipwrecks. They’re going to be using his instruments, this process is called Geophysics or remote sensing,” said Smith.

There are several next steps in verifying the wreckage as the U.S.S. Chattanooga.

“In the 21st-century it’s really focused on not disturbing sites if at all avoid it. We use these in our techniques, we use these geophysical methods to create very high-resolution maps. If we are to do Dave’s or anything else in greater depth survey we can be very precise with it we can be very efficient at it and know where we want to go and what we want to survey,” said Smith.