Into Action Aboard a Monitor at Charleston
Crew members aboard U.S.S. Nahant, one of the last surviving Civil War monitors, pose on deck for a photograph during the Spanish-American War in 1898. The dents in the turret behind them were put there by Confederate shot off Charleston, thirty-five years before.
One hundred fifty years ago Sunday afternoon, warships of the Union’s South Atlantic Blockading Squadron steamed into Charleston harbor, intent on pounding Fort Sumter into submission. The U.S. Navy’s commanding officer, Rear Admiral S. F. Du Pont (right), had at his disposal two full divisions of ironclad monitors that, he hoped, would be able to stand up against the Confederate batteries ringing the harbor. But the Confederate fire was too great, most of Du Pont’s ships were seriously damaged in the action. After about ninety minutes’ hard action, the Union fleet withdrew. In his report to the Navy Department, Du Pont described the event as a “failure,” but saw his withdrawal as one that had averted what otherwise would have been a “disaster.”[1]
Since we’ve talked a good bit about Civil War-era monitors here, I’d like to share an account of this action by Alvah Folsom Hunter (1846-1933), a sixteen-year-old ship’s boy aboard one of those monitors, U.S.S. Nahant. Hunter had been in the Navy only a few months, and recorded his experiences aboard Nahant in great detail. An annotated edition of Hunter’s diary was published in 1987, edited Craig Symonds.[2] Most of the drawings that accompany Hunter’s account here are by one of his shipmates aboard Nahant, Assistant Surgeon Charles Ellery Stedman.
U.S.S. Weehawken’s “devil,” as depicted in the ORN.
At noon signal was made from the Ironsides (the flagship) to get under way, and then another delay caught us. It had been ordered that the Weehawken should lead the line of monitors, and some over-wise individual had devised an apparatus for lifting or exploding any torpedoes which might be encountered in the advance. The Weehawken was encumbered with this device, which had been well named “a devil.” “It was formed of very heavy timbers crossing at right angles, bolted together, and was about fifty feet in length, shaped not unlike a boot-jack, the bows of the vessel propelling within the notch. The after-ends, or jaws, of the raft were secured by chains to the bows of the vessel”. There were grapnels to catch the torpedoes suspended beneath this cumbersome raft. When the Weehawken was hoisting her anchor, the chain became entangled with these grapnels, and caused over an hour’s delay before the chain was cleared and the anchor hoisted up. Not only that, but the encumbrance upon her bows made the naturally unwieldy monitor still more unwieldy and difficult to steer, and but for the tide having turned and begun to run flood again, it is doubtful if the Weehawken could have steamed up against the current so as to come within range of Fort Sumter. As the Weehawken was the appointed leader of the line, a delay to her held back the entire fleet.
The order of battle was that known as “line ahead,” or, as a soldier would state it, “single file.” The eight monitors were formed into two divisions, with the frigate Ironsides (flagship) between the first and second division. In the first division were the Weehawken, Passaic, Montauk, and Patapsco; in the second the Catskill, Nantucket, Nahant, and Keokuk.
The distance between the vessels was intended to be one hundred yards, but they steered so badly it was quite impossible to keep close to distance. The monitors were extremely heavy, unwieldy vessels, steering badly when conditions were at the best. Being in shallow water increased the difficulty of steering, and when steaming ahead very slowly, the difficulty was still further increased; the clumsy vessels were here pretty nearly unmanageable.
When the signal to get underway was made, our crew was called to quarters, and those of us who were stationed on the berth deck, where we could hear little and see nothing, found the long wait very trying to our nerves. We knew that the engine was frequently started and then stopped again, and supposed the starting and stopping were but incidents of getting the vessels into line formation, but why the long, long delay in opening fire, we did not know. It was nearly three hours after the call to quarters that we began faintly to hear the boom of the guns of some of the vessels, and it was ten minutes past three o’clock when our two guns were fired in quick succession.
The relief we all felt when at last our guns spoke out was very great, and we gladly hastened to such duties as came to us. Passing on to the door of the magazine the call for cartridges and shells, seeing these brought to and passed through the door to the turret chamber, shaking the inverted cartridge tub over the tub of water, and then returning it to the door of the magazine, didn’t call for furious activity on our part, but, it was something to do, and a great relief to our strained nerves.
Handling ammunition in the compartment below the turret, by Nahant’s Ship’s Surgeon, C. E. Stedman.
The leading division had come into action about three o’clock, and soon after that the Admiral, finding the Ironsides pretty nearly unmanageable in the shallow water and having had to anchor, ordered the signal: “Disregard the movements of the flagship” to be hoisted. This signal at once set free the vessels in the second division and they steamed past the flagship into close action. The Nahant was probably the fastest of the single-turreted monitors, and the Keokuk, next her in line, was even faster. These two vessels, the last in the line, steamed ahead at full speed and were quickly in the thickest of the fight.
“Four bells” sounding on the gong in the engine room, which ordered the engineer to go ahead at full speed, was distinctly heard by us on the berth deck, and in a few minutes cannon shot began to strike the Nahant. At first the hits were few and scattering, but, as we drew nearer to Sumter, they were more frequent. Captain Downes stated that we went up to within five-hundred yards of Sumter, nearer to that fort than any other vessel, and the shots came down upon us in an irregular staccato. There was about twenty-five minutes’ time when we were struck on an average about once a minute.
Stedman’s drawing of Nahant’s turret in action. Stedman omits much of the internal bracing used in the turret, but captures the action well.
One of the heavy shot struck our turret fairly, about two feet above the deck and just over the heads of the three of us boys who were standing near the turret-chamber door, and so tremendous was the impact, we all three instinctively ducked our heads. The solid shot was smashed and we clearly heard the pieces rattling down upon the deck above our heads.
While we were coming into close action, our guns were kept as busy as the difficulty of loading and firing them permitted. Both guns were fired seven times each, and a little later the XI-inch gun was brought to bear upon one of the forts and fired for the eighth time, making fifteen shots in all fired by the Nahant.
Cross-section through the hull, turret and pilothouse of a Civil War monitor similar to U.S.S. Nahant.
Just after we came under the terrific fire which rained down upon us, three heavy shots struck the pilot-house in quick succession. [Unlike the original Monitor, the pilot-house on Passaic Class ships was located atop the turret for maximum all-around visibility.] One of these shots struck just at the base of the pilot-house, where a massive iron ring, some four inches deep by a foot wide, rested upon the top of the turret. This ring was put there as a safeguard, to prevent a shot which might strike there from penetrating at the angle formed by the base of the wall of the pilot-house and top of the turret. The metal of this iron ring was bulged outward and upward, and the inch-thick plates of the pilot-house were bulged outward and downward around the deep dent made by the shot. The result was that the turret and pilot-house were tightly welded together; the turret was “jammed” and could not be revolved.
At almost the same instant, a shot struck the pilot-house close beside one of the peepholes which were cut through the walls to give those on duty inside some view of matters outside. The bolts which held the inch-thick plates together were countersunk into the plates on the outside, the nuts being on the inside. Heavy curtains made of two thicknesses of canvas with hair quilted in between hung around the inside of both turret and pilot-house to prevent the heavy nuts on these bolts from flying if the bolts were struck by a shot, but in the pilothouse there had to be holes cut through this curtain where it covered the peepholes. The shot which struck close beside a peephole struck squarely on one of the bolts, the bolt broke off close by the nut inside, the nut and bolt-end being driven across the inside of the pilot-house with the velocity of a solid shot.
Stedman’s depiction of the action off Fort Sumter in April 1863, with (l. to r.) Nantucket, New Ironsides and Nahant. Stedman, as was his pratice at the time, gave the first and last of these vessels the fictional names of “Otternel” and Semantecook” in the caption of his drawing.
Quartermaster [Edward] Cobb was at the wheel, Pilot [Isaac] Sofield stood a little behind him and was stooping over a bit to observe what could be seen through a peephole on the other side, and Captain Downes was standing a little to one side of the pilot. The flying nut struck Cobb upon the side of his forehead, tearing off a piece of his skull about five inches long by three wide, inflicting a mortal wound. It next struck Pilot Sofield close beside the spinal column at the base of the neck making a deep cut nearly two inches in length and effecting a paralysis of the body because of the shock to the nerves, so that he dropped as though instantly killed. It then glanced upward and struck the top of the pilot-house, then re-bounded downward upon Captain Downes’ foot, inflicting a painful bruise which kept the Captain limping about with the aid of a stout cane for several days.
We on the berth deck knew nothing of this tragedy till the turret chamber door opened and three men came through bearing the body of poor Cobb, and my first sight of a wounded man was when I heard a gasping moan, turned around and looked directly down upon the gaping wound on the side of Cobb’s head. Then, for a few seconds, I wished I was back in Boston.
The wounded man was borne to the wardroom table, which was requisitioned for a surgery when we went into battle. It was quickly seen that the case was hopeless, the wound was mortal, and the unfortunate quartermaster was tenderly moved to his hammock, which was spread down on the berth deck for him.
Two or three mimutes after Cobb had been brought down, the inert body of Pilot Sofield was lowered down from the pilot-house to the turret, then lowered to the chamber below and borne to the wardroom table. I was summoned to make ready the berth in Mr. [Ensign Charles C.] Ricker’s stateroom for Pilot Sofield, and overheard Dr. Stedman[3] telling his assistant that if the blow had struck half-an-inch to the right, it would have killed the pilot, as it would have smashed the spinal column. Striking where it did it made only a deep and painful flesh wound, but the shock to the spinal cord had effected a paralysis.[4]
Treating casualties in action on the wardroom table, by Assistant Surgeon Stedman. This scene actually depicts his earlier ship, U.S.S. Huron.
Another man was quite badly wounded at just about the same moment as those in the pilot-house, a seaman named John McAllister. He was one of a gun’s crew and was standing beside his gun in the turret. One of the shots striking the turret broke off a piece of iron which weighed seventy-eight pounds. This piece of iron was thrown violently across the turret, in its course striking and bending the rod which operated the steering gear, and then struck down McAllister, injuring him severely.
The steering gear was put out of business by this accident, and there we were: helpless, drifting slowly up towards the obstructions and under the fire of a hundred heavy guns. It was fully ten minutes before the supplementary steering gear in the turret-chamber could be got into working condition. When it was working, efforts were made to so steer the ship that the guns could be again trained upon Fort Sumter, but these efforts were futile, and the Nahant was headed out just as the signal for the fleet to withdraw was hoisted on the flagship. The Nahant joined the other vessels and all moved down to the former anchorage.
Stedman’s depiction of repairing battle damage on U.S.S. Nahant, this time after a subsequent “set-to” with Confederate gunners at Fort Wagner on Morris Island.
Du Pont had been reluctant to stage this attack with naval forces alone; he had urged a coordinated attack, using large numbers of land troops to help secure the batteries around the perimeter of the harbor. The events of April 7 vindicated Du Pont’s original position, as well as showing the limitations of the then-still-new armored ships in attacking heavy, well-trained shore batteries. After Du Pont’s failed attack, the Union strategy shifted to one that prioritized taking the forts on the outer periphery of Charleston Harbor, gradually working toward Sumter itself. If you’ve seen the great Civil War movie Glory, you have some familiarity with that part of the war.
Finally, if you haven’t seen his posts lately, my colleague Craig Swain has been doin’ the knowledge on the development of the Confederate defenses at Charleston over at his blog, To the Sound of the Guns. It’s fantastic stuff, in all its primary-source, granular detail. Great work, Craig — you’re showing how it’s done.
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[1] S. F. Du Pont to Gideon Welles, “Attack by Federal ironclads upon the defenses of Charleston, S. C., April 7, 1863,” April 8, 1863. ORN, vol 14, 3.
[2] Alvah F. Hunter, A Year on a Monitor and the Destruction of Fort Sumter, Craig L. Symonds, ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1987).
[3] “Dr. Stedman” was Assistant Surgeon Charles Ellery Stedman, ship’s surgeon aboard Nahant, whose sketches illustrate this post. Charles Ellery Stedman, The Civil War Sketchbook of Charles Ellery Stedman, Surgeon, United States Navy. Jim Dan Hill, ed. (San Rafael, California: Presidio Press, 1976).
[4] Sofield’s paralysis may have been temporary; Assistant Surgeon Stedman’s after-action casualty report does not mention the paralysis, and says that Sofield “is doing well.” Pilot Sofield was still on active duty with Nahant at the end of 1863. C. Ellery Stedman, “Report of casualties on the U. S. S. Nahant,” April 7, 1863. ORN, vol 14, 5; John J. Cornwell, “Report of Lieutenant-Commander Cornwell, U. S. Navy, regarding drifting timber from the harbor obstructions,” December 29, 1863. ORN, vol 15, 210-211.
Kerosene Billy in Fact and Fiction
This image, posted recently at SHPG, caught my eye, particularly given its description:
It’s a dramatic and potent symbol of the ravages of the war on the South. Or it would be, if it were true.
The ruins in question are those of the Great Falls Cotton Mill in Rockingham, built in 1869, that were destroyed in a fire in October 1972. It’s a well-known local landmark, and is even included in the Historic American Buildings Survey. As near as I can tell, Uncle Billy’s bummers were not suspected in the 1972 conflagration.
Now, there was a large mill on (or near) this site that was reportedly burned by Sherman’s troops, but this one ain’t it, and ninety seconds with “teh Google” would have made that clear. This misattribution is not a huge, hairy deal, but is it too much to ask for folks to expend a little effort — just a little — in getting this stuff right?
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Free Access to Confederate Records on Fold3 in April
The commercial subscription service, Fold3, is providing free access to Confederate records for the month of April in recognition of Confederate History Month. It’s a good opportunity to become familiar with the resources available, particularly compiled service records (CSRs) of individual soldiers. Have at it.
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How Crowded Was Monitor‘s Turret?
Very.
Samuel Dana Greene’s account of the action with C.S.S. Virginia gives the following description:
It’s not clear to me whether the two gun captains, Stocking and Loughran, were being counted by Greene as part of the eight men assigned to their respective guns, so the total number in the turret during the action was either nineteen or twenty-one. To get a visual sense of what that looked like, I dropped nineteen figures into a model of Monitor‘s turret. This is the result:
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This model doesn’t include any of the other necessary gear that would have been inside the turret, and there was additional plating on the interior surface of the turret (over the joints in the primary plating) that’s not reflected in the model. (Haven’t got to it yet.) So in reality, it was likely more cramped than shown in the model. I haven’t made any particular attempt to put crewmen in exact gun drill positions, either. Also note that the heavy, iron pendula that closed the gunports could not be opened simultaneously — there was too little space between the ports for both to swing clear toward the centerline at the same time. In practice, you would not see both guns run out at the same time.
Nonetheless, a very crowded and chaotic place.
Previous, incomplete renders of this structure are on Flickr, although those show the two hatches on the top of the turret incorrectly — the slid backwards, not inboard as specified on Eriocsson’s original plan.
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Confederate Flag Cases at the Fourth Circuit
Quick updates on two Confederate flag cases covered previously here:
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond declined to reinstate the case of Candice Hardwick of Latta, South Carolina, who was twice suspended from school for wearing a Confederate flag t-shirt back in 2006. The case was dismissed by a (federal?) court in South Carolina in 2009, and subsequently reinstated. She initially lost her case in 2010, and the case was dismissed again just about exactly a year ago. Federal case law, particularly in the wake of Morse v. Frederick (the infamous 2007 “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case), gives school administrators very wide latitude in restricting student speech. Lots of folks across the political spectrum have deep reservations about the Supremes’ ruling in Morse, but that’s where we are right now.
That same Fourth Circuit recently rescheduled a hearing to reinstate the SCV’s lawsuit against the City of Lexington over its 2011 ordinance barring all but official, government flags from its light poles and other public fixtures. The hearing was originally scheduled for March 20, but at the last minute the court pushed it back to May 15. The change was not requested by either party. The U.S. District Court had dismissed the case last June, calling the ordinance on its face to be “reasonable, nondiscriminatory, [and] content-neutral.” If the plaintiff, the SCV’s Stonewall Brigade, wins reinstatement of the case, it will presumably go back for trial to the same district court that dismissed it in the first place.
Update, March 28: This story from the Courthouse News Service provides much more background on the Candice Hardwick case than I’ve seen in other news reports. Disputes with the school over her flag attire go back to early 2003, at least three years before the suspension that resulted in the lawsuit, when she insisted on wearing a “Southern Chicks” shirt with a Confederate Battle Flag. In middle school. Subsequent attire included the legends, “Offended by School Censorship of Southern Heritage,” “Daddy’s Little Redneck,” “Jesus and the Confederate Battle Flag: Banned from Our Schools, but Forever in Our Hearts,” a black Confederates shirt, and one with a picture of the U.S. flag with the caption, “Flew over legalized slavery for 90 years!” This is less a case of a naive kid wanting to honor her ancestors, than a deliberate and years-long intent to force a showdown. And she got it.
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Aye Candy: The Confederate Ironclad That Almost Was
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This model of the Confederate casemate ironclad Wilmington is based on reconstruction plans drawn in the 1960s by W. E. Geoghagen, a maritime specialist at the Smithsonian Institution. Geoghagen’s drawings, in turn, are based on surviving plans prepared by the Confederate Navy’s Chief Constructor, John L. Porter (1813-1893). Full-size images are available on Flickr.
Wilmington was the last of three ironclads built at her namesake city during the Civil War. Neither of the first two had accomplished much during its service. The first, North Carolina, was structurally unsound and, like many of her type, was woefully underpowered. North Carolina was used in the brackish Cape Fear River as a floating battery until she sank at her moorings in September 1864, her bottom eaten through by teredo. The second ironclad, Raleigh, had been completed in the spring of 1864 and sortied to attack the Union blockading fleet off Fort Fisher. Raleigh managed to drive off several blockaders but upon her return upriver grounded on a sandbar and broke her keel, effectively making her a total loss.
Construction on the new ironclad began soon after Raleigh’s loss, in the late spring of 1864. In designing the vessel, Porter sought to remedy two serious flaws exposed by Raleigh’s brief sortie against the Union fleet: first, that she lacked sufficient speed to close the range and force a fight, and second, that she drew too much water to safely operate in the Cape Fear estuary.
Porter’s design is almost unique among Confederate ironclads, with a long length-to-beam ration of more than 6.5-to-1, perhaps in imitation of the long, fast blockade runners that operated between Wilmington, Bermuda and Nassau. The new ship, dubbed by locals as the future C.S.S. Wilmington, was unusual above deck, too. While almost all Confederate ironclads built or planned for construction in the Confederacy during the war followed the pattern set in 1862 by the famous C.S.S. Virginia (ex-U.S.S. Merrimack), by using a single, large armored casemate to house the ship’s battery, the vessel being built at Wilmington would have two small, low, casemates, each with a single, heavy gun working on a pivot on the inside. Each miniature casemate was fitted with seven ports, 45 degrees apart, giving the guns a wide (if narrowly segmented) field of fire. While the Confederacy lacked the resources to construct a revolving turret like those fitted on the Union Navy’s monitors, Porter’s design was a serious attempt to replicate the monitors’ greatest tactical advantages: all-around fire by a few, very heavy guns, and presenting the enemy’s gunners with a very small target. She is somewhat unusual for Confederate ironclads in that she was not built to be fitted with a ram.
Unfortunately, Wilmington never saw action, and was never formally commissioned. (Nor was the vessel ever officially named Wilmington; that’s what the locals called her.) She was still on the stocks, nearing completion, when the city of Wilmington was evacuated. This vessel, representing perhaps the most advanced design of ironclad built in the Confederacy during the war, was put to the torch to keep her from falling into the hands of Union troops.
Because Wilmington was never completed, we cannot know exactly how she would have appeared in service. Bob Holcombe, in his masters thesis “The Evolution of Confederate Ironclad Design” (East Carolina University 1993), notes that 150 tons of one-inch plate taken from the decrepit old North Carolina might have been intended for Wilmington’s open deck. In recreating the ship, I’ve left the deck unarmored, but I did put plating over the timbered knuckle that extends outboard on either side of the ship. This model represents a “what if” depiction of the ship as she might have looked if she’d been completed and fully commissioned, sometime in the summer of 1865. I don’t think this ship (or several of them) would’ve changed the overall equation at Wilmington and Fort Fisher, but it’s intriguing to imagine how she would have performed in action. With the right engines (probably a practical impossibility in that time and place) she might have been a real menace to the blockaders as a hit-and-run raider.
Special thanks to Kazimierz Zygadlo for his assistance in compiling material on this remarkable warship-that-almost-was.
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Alongside the Union river monitor U.S.S. Onondaga, for comparison.
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Privates Wyatt and John W. Vaughan, Texas State Troops
A brief ceremony was held on Saturday morning in Galveston to recognize the memory of two Confederate soldiers who died here 149 years ago this month. Privates Wyatt and John Vaughan were father and son, respectively, serving with a regiment of state troops stationed here during the latter part of the war. Both contract typhoid fever. Eighteen-year-old John died on March 25, 1864; his 44-year-old father died three days later. Both were buried in graves in the city’s old potter’s field, which lies about 100 yards west of the site of today’s ceremony.
The old UCV plot where the Vaughans’ memorial stones were placed today contains several modern stones, but as far as I know none of the men so memorialized are actually interred there. At least one, H. R. Ostermeyer, survived the war, only to die in the hurricane that swept Galveston in September 1900.
Today’s service was sponsored by the Veuve Jefferson Davis Chapter No. 7 of the UDC, with support and assistance by the John Bell Hood Camp of the SCV, which also provided the color guard. Several Vaughan descendants attended the event.
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Aye Candy: C.S.S. Virginia
Updated renders of C.S.S. Virginia (formerly U.S.S. Merrimack), showing revisions done last year for an illustration in the Civil War Monitor magazine. Special thanks to Anna Holloway of the Mariners Museum for providing guidance on the model. Full-sized renders on Flickr.
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Sabine Pass Update
My colleague Ed Cotham shares the latest issue of the Sabine Pass Beacon (PDF), the newsletter of the Friends of Sabine Pass Battleground. This issue includes important information about sesquicentennial events planned for September, and the recent installation at the park of the walking beam (above) from the Union gunboat U.S.S. Clifton.
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So Much for “Boot Elrod” and the Lexington Boycott
Not sure how I missed this, but Lexington Mayor Mimi Elrod was re-elected to another four-year term last November with a vigorous 63% of the vote. That was Elrod’s second electoral win against her opponent, Council Member Mary Harvey-Halseth, whom she defeated for mayor in 2008, with 59%. (Harvey-Halseth’s term on council is staggered with the mayor’s, so she retains her council seat.) Harvey-Halseth voted against the ordinance barring non-governmental flags on city-owned poles back in 2011, but I don’t get the impression that the dispute over the Confederate flag played much of a role in the 2012 mayoral race. There seems to be much more focus on efforts to revitalize the downtown area of Lexington.
“Boot Elrod” has been a watchword of the Flaggers practically since the flag ordinance was passed in 2011; even then, a change in the composition of the city government offered the best hope for reversing the ordinance. A court challenge has always been a long shot, as Susan Hathaway acknowledged at the time. But I’ve never been convinced that the ordinance has been a particularly important issue for more than a handful of Lexingtonians, and the results of November’s city election there seem to bear that out.
After the election, Billy Bearden complained that the “Boot Elrod Campaign so gloriously began was allowed to die an inglorious death by the people in and around Lexington that should have kept it alive.” My guess is that “the people in and around Lexington,” as a whole, aren’t nearly so torqued about Confederate flags as Bearden, Hathaway and others think they ought to be. The make-believe Confederates should know better; the News-Gazette noted at the time of the ordinance vote that opposition to it came overwhelmingly from people — like Bearden, Hathaway, and peripatetic Confederate beard H. K. Edgerton — who don’t actually live in Lexington:
One factor in Elrod’s re-election may be that things are looking up economically in Lexington, as in most other parts of the country. Unemployment remains high compared to the state and national averages, at 9.8% in December 2012, but still lower than at the time of the ordinance in September 2011 (11.3%), and well below its Great Recession peak of 14.0% in June 2010.
By contrast, the Flaggers have been working against economic recovery in Lexington, in a way that undoubtedly caught the attention of many residents. Along with the “Boot Elrod” campaign, Hathaway, Bearden, and folks like local SCV leader Brandon Dorsey have been pushing a campaign to boycott Lexington businesses, in the hopes of pressuring them to get the city council to reverse its position. That effort, too, appears to have accomplished little or nothing. The City of Lexington recently released its financial report for FY 2012, covering the period from July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2012, ten months of which fell after the adoption of the flag ordinance and during the period of the boycott. In the three categories of city revenue that directly reflect business activity and tourism — sales taxes, restaurant taxes and hotel/motel taxes — revenues all increased:
From the City of Lexington’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for FY2011, p. 32:
And from the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for FY2012, p. 32:
And in summary:
Last month I contacted Lexington’s Director of Finance, who confirmed that the rates in these categories did not change from FY2011 to FY2012, meaning that these numbers reflect an actual increase in relevant business activity. These are strong numbers — substantially stronger than current national GDP, which is dragging along at an anemic 2% annual growth rate. Business in Lexington is looking up. To be sure, not every business in Lexington is doing well — some businesses will go bust, even in boom years — but overall, local business activity in Lexington is trending up, not down.
The Flaggers aren’t likely to give up their boycott or the campaign to “Boot Elrod” anytime soon, and that’s their prerogative. But it’s hard to see any substantive effect of either initiative, any more than they’ve restored the flags to the exterior of the Pelham Chapel. They’ll continue to stir the pot — “Are YOU mad enough yet? RISE UP, VIRGINIA!”, etc., etc. — and keep the faith.
After all, November 2016 is just around the corner!
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UPDATE, March 20: I almost forgot — a big thank-you goes out to Billy Bearden, who was the first to point me to the city’s annual financial report as a source of economic data for Lexington. Couldn’t have done this post without you, my friend!
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