The Battle of the Ironclads and the Day the Navy Changed

On March 9, 1862, two iron-plated warships — the CSS Virginia (formerly the USS Merrimack) and the USS Monitor — fought for four hours in the waters of Hampton Roads, the channel where the James River meets the Chesapeake Bay, and when they were done every wooden warship in every navy in the world was obsolete. The battle was a draw, but the revolution was total: iron had replaced wood, and naval warfare would never look the same.

The Mariners' Museum in Newport News — twenty minutes from Norfolk — houses the recovered turret of the USS Monitor, raised from the ocean floor in 2002 after 140 years on the bottom. The turret is the centerpiece of the museum's Civil War gallery, and seeing it — corroded, encrusted, the gun ports still visible — produces the particular vertigo of standing next to an object that changed history and then spent a century and a half underwater.

The Hampton Roads channel where the battle took place is visible from multiple points — Fort Monroe on the north shore, Fort Wool on a man-made island in the channel — and the water looks ordinary, which is the point. History happened here, in the same water that the cargo ships and Navy vessels use today, and the ordinariness of the setting makes the story more powerful: the future of warfare was decided in a tidal estuary that smells of salt and diesel, and the only monument is the water itself.

Norfolk is a Navy town to its bones, and the Monitor-Virginia battle is the city's founding myth — the moment when this harbor stopped being a colonial port and became the home of the world's most powerful navy. The Naval Station Norfolk — the largest naval base in the world — sits on the same water, and every ship that passes through the channel sails over the spot where iron met iron and the old world sank.