Cape May Point, New Jersey
The Concrete Ship
About a hundred and fifty feet off Sunset Beach there is a lump of broken concrete in the water. It is a ship. She was built of concrete because there was no steel, sunk on purpose to build a ferry pier, and the ferry she was meant to serve did not start running for another thirty-eight years.
Why anybody built a ship out of concrete
When the United States entered the First World War, steel went to the military first and shipbuilders went short. The Emergency Fleet Corporation contracted a batch of experimental concrete cargo hulls as a substitute, and a new light-aggregate concrete made from burned clay was developed specifically for this one.
The contract was signed on 17 December 1917. Her keel was laid on 18 March 1918. Only twelve of the program's concrete vessels were completed after the Armistice, and Atlantus was the first of the twelve to finish — the second concrete ship ever built in America.
| Length | About 250 feet |
|---|---|
| Beam | 45 feet |
| Draft | About 16 feet |
| Displacement | 3,000 tons |
She was launched stern-first into Oglethorpe Bay at Brunswick, Georgia, on 4 December 1918 — on the third try, after two failed attempts. She had been ordered as Brokenbow; Edith Wilson renamed her Atlantus before the launch.
She was not a good ship
She carried cargo for about a year — the West Indies first, then coal between Norfolk and New England. After seventeen sailings the operators concluded she did not pay, and in 1920 she was laid up in the James River with the rest of the surplus fleet.
In 1925 she was sold for scrap for a little over three thousand dollars and stripped of everything worth taking. That should have been the end of it.
The ferry plan
On 30 April 1926, Colonel Jesse Rosenfeld bought the stripped hull for the National Navigation Company. He had a plan for the crossing between Cape May and Delaware — the same crossing the Cape May–Lewes Ferry makes today.
The scheme was this: dredge a channel at Cape May Point, tow Atlantus in, fill her with sand and sink her deliberately to serve as the pier. Then bring in two surplus wooden ships, anchor them stern to stern with her in a Y formation, and sink those as the ferry slips. Ground was broken for the dock in March 1926.
What actually happened
She would not stay where they put her.
| 8 June 1926 | Arrives at Cape May Point under tow, 11 in the morning. |
|---|---|
| 10 July | Driven aground in a storm before she can be placed. |
| 11 July | Refloated. Drags her anchor, repeatedly. |
| 12 July | Snags a sewer discharge pipe. |
| End of July | Finally freed, positioned, and sunk on purpose as intended. |
Work resumed with her as the foundation. Then interest in the ferry drained away, the money stopped, and the project was abandoned — leaving a deliberately sunk concrete ship off a beach with nothing built on it.
A correction worth making. The popular version of this story — the one on the roadside marker and repeated almost everywhere — says a storm on 8 June 1926 broke her loose from her moorings and drove her ashore, and that is why the plan failed.
Contemporary newspaper reporting says 8 June is the day she arrived, that the storm grounding was on 10 July, and that she was successfully placed and sunk as intended at the end of that month. The plan did not die on the beach; it died of lost interest afterwards. This page follows the newspapers.
What became of her
She had a second life as a prop. The Coast Guard training station at Cape May used the wreck for breeches-buoy rescue drills, filmed for newsreels in 1927 and again in 1930. For a while somebody mounted a boat-insurance billboard on her hull.
Then the sea got on with it.
- Late 1920s and 1930s — listing slightly to port, but largely intact above water.
- 1937 — a seam in the hull splits open.
- Mid-1950s — she begins breaking apart.
- 1961 — she splits into two sections.
- Now — fragments. Some of what is left shows only at low tide; the rest is under water.
People who visited as children and come back are often shocked. There was a recognizable ship out there within living memory.
The ending she did not get to see. The crossing she was bought to serve did happen — on 1 July 1964, thirty-eight years later, run by the Delaware River and Bay Authority with secondhand boats bought off the Chesapeake.
If you are reading this on the ferry, you are on the service she was supposed to be the foundation of. She is off to starboard, on the New Jersey side, at the beach where everybody stands to watch the sun go down.
Seeing her
She lies about 150 feet off Sunset Beach at the western end of Cape May Point. Low tide shows the most. She is also, as it happens, a favorite roost for seabirds and shorebirds — which makes her the most-photographed pile of rubble on the Delaware Bay.