Ships of concrete long sunk off the Eastern Shore

You are, no doubt, familiar with the Man of Steel, Superman.

He wears flashy tights under briefs, and he does flashy things like leap tall buildings in a single bound. Very steel-like.

Now consider concrete.

A less flashy substance would be hard to find. It's gray. It's workmanlike. It gets stepped on all the time.

But concrete has some hidden qualities. It's tough and adaptable. Its bonds are tight. It gets invisibly stronger as it ages. So imagine the superhero possibilities, and then make them real.

Man of Steel, meet the Men of Concrete.

They stand in two rows in the Chesapeake Bay off Kiptopeke State Park on the Eastern Shore. They are ships made of concrete, used to transport military supplies during World War II, then lined up and half-sunk in 1949 to form a breakwater.

Ted Boelt, the park's storekeeper, is fascinated by the concrete ships.

Talbot, Cowham, Grant, Meade, Lesley, Pollard, Thacher, Slater, Wason.

"I just think they're very cool old ladies," Boelt says.

OK, here's where it gets a little complicated. The Men of Concrete were masculine, but their names were attached to ships, which traditionally are feminine. So those very cool old ladies Boelt refers to have first names such as Arthur and Willis.

Those names belonged to real men, each one a pioneer in the concrete industry. Boelt sees their namesakes - the ladies - every day he goes to work.

"Well, you know, bless their hearts, I am impressed with them because they actually served in the war," he said, and he means the ladies who were named after the men.

The concrete ships were manufactured when steel was in short supply. The vessels now in the Kiptopeke breakwater served during the latter years of the war.

They were named after men such as Arthur Newell Talbot, a professor for 56 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Among other things, Talbot studied the relationship between the strength of reinforced concrete and the proportions of its ingredients - one part water to two parts gravel to three parts cement, that sort of thing - beginning in 1903. The university is proud to have named its materials testing lab after Talbot.

William Foster Cowham's name was bestowed on a concrete ship in recognition of, perhaps, his cement company in Texas or, maybe, his design and engineering work on the country's first cement plant powered by electricity, in Cement City, Mich., in 1901. He is remembered today by the Texas State Historical Association handbook's entry on the Lafarge Corp., "a multinational cement producer and operator of coal mines, chemical plants, sugar refineries and paper mills." He is also mentioned on a historical marker near Dallas.

Perhaps this is a good place to explain the difference between cement and concrete.

Cement is made of calcium, gypsum, lime, silica and other substances, ground into powder. That powder, when combined with water, makes a paste that holds things together.

Concrete is what happens when the cement paste holds together sand and gravel or stone mixed in precise proportions. When concrete is poured around steel rebar or some other armature, it is called reinforced concrete, which is exactly what Kiptopeke's concrete ships are made of.

Concrete is tough, and that is why nine concrete ships, once World War II ended and made them surplus, were towed to Kiptopeke to form a breakwater that protected the ferry landing from waves in the Bay.

The ladies were lined up, bow to stern, in two rows, then they were either ballasted or flooded, depending on your source of information. They settled to the bottom, where they sit today, upright, leaving the Men of Concrete up to their necks in water.

John Grant (Hull No. 1454) appears to have authored in 1875 a publication outlining his tests on bricks, cements and other materials. Titled "Experiments on the Strength of Cement: Chiefly in Reference to the Portland Cement Used in the Southern Main Drainage Works," was reprinted in 2009.

His fellow author, Richard Kidder Meade (Hull No. 1449), was chemist to the Dexter Portland Cement Co. of Pennsylvania and editor of The Chemical Engineer. His book "Portland cement; its composition, raw materials, manufacture, testing and analysis" was published in 1906.

Right here you might be wondering what Portland cement is. According to the Portland Cement Association, it is simply a generic name for cement, and neither a brand name nor a city.

Robert Whitman Lesley (Hull No. 1457) wrote "Concrete Factories: An illustrated review of the principles of construction of reinforced concrete buildings, including reports of the Sub-Committee on Tests, the U.S. Geological Survey and the French Rules on Reinforced Concrete," in 1907.

Lt. Willard A. Pollard (Hull No. 1464) is mysteriously referenced only as a contributor to "Activities of the Bureau of Yards and Docks, Navy Department, World War 1917-1918," although the United States Helium Production Plant and Civil Engineer Corps are prominently mentioned.

Which could raise the question: If concrete is heavy, and we can all agree on that, how can a concrete ship float?

As a child living near Kiptopeke, Boelt wondered the same thing. He experimented in a nearby pond, using his mother's heavy crockery mixing bowls, although she didn't know it. None of them would float.

Now that he has learned more about the ships, he is wiser.

"I kind of get that they float - displacement of water and all that - but I don't see why they didn't break all to pieces in high seas."

The ships floated because, when one was set into the sea, it made a hull-shaped dent in the water. The weight of the water pushed aside was greater than the weight of the ship itself. The water pushed back, trying to fill the dent, with enough force to support the ship.

The cracking is another matter.

While Boelt was at work in the camp store one summer day in 2009, surrounded by T-shirts, caps, mugs, refrigerator magnets, hat pins and other souvenirs that feature the concrete ships (sometimes with a lovely sunset behind them), he was approached by an older man.

He gave his name as James Turner and said he had been on the crew of a tow boat that brought the Edwin Thacher from Alabama to Virginia. After rounding Florida, the boat encountered rough water in the Atlantic.

The tow boat captain, spotting a crack in the Thacher's hull, posted 17-year-old Turner in the stern with an ax and orders to cut the tow cable should the concrete ship start to sink. But it didn't.

"The old girl is here," Boelt said. "I'm fairly certain I have identified it as the second one in line."

That's the only one of the ships he has been able to distinguish. They bear no identification numbers or plates, and as they are all identical, except for the cracked one, their individual names have been forgotten.

The human Edwin Thacher was a bridge engineer and the inventor of a circular slide rule that was patented in 1881. His obituary in the Engineering News-Record of 1920 calls him "a pioneer of reinforced concrete," and his obit in the New York Times says he was a partner in the Concrete-Steel Engineering Co. and helped to build across the Kansas River an arch bridge, which was, at the time, the largest concrete and steel bridge in the world.

Willis A. Slater (Hull No. 450), identified on the title page as an engineer physicist, wrote "Shear tests of reinforced concrete beams," which was published in 1926 by the Government Printing Office for the Bureau of Standards, and "Test of a flat slab reinforced concrete floor at Shredded Wheat Factory, Niagara Falls, N.Y." in 1914.

And then there is Leonard Chase Wason (Hull No. 1451), who was cited in a 1915 issue of the weekly Engineering and Contracting as "one of the foremost exponents of efficiency in reinforced concrete construction in this country." Wason, who was president, treasurer and general manager of the Aberthaw Construction Co. of Boston, helped build Harvard Stadium.

Boelt this fall stood on the pier at Kiptopeke State Park and said, "They do their job," but he meant the ships. He figures erosion would have nibbled away more of the shoreline had the breakwater not been there. He enjoys the odd sight of grass growing on the forward bulkhead of one ship, and the seabirds that colonize the decks.

"All kinds of little critters have attached themselves to the hulls," he said.

In fact, the concrete ships have a reputation as one of the best fishing spots near Hampton Roads. Striped bass and tautog are regularly caught there in season.

The ships are looking rough. Rebar pokes through holes in some places, and concrete is crumbling off. As a reckless youngster, Boelt squeezed through a hole and got inside one ship, where he found stoves and bunks still in place.

Longtime residents of the Eastern Shore say utensils and supplies, even some doors, were auctioned off in 1949, soon after the ships arrived, and found new homes in some local residences.

"There's nothing really romantic about them," Boelt said, "but I think they're cool because they did their job. I had no idea that concrete was a viable building tool for ships."

Boelt is so impressed with the ships that he put together a little pamphlet, available in the camp store, called "The Kiptopeke Navy." It says that more of the military's surplus concrete ships form a floating breakwater in British Columbia's Powell River.

The pamphlet has a little history of the ferry and a few photos. He is modest about his effort, and about his interest in the concrete ships.

"Probably," he said, "no one else cares."

Diane Tennant, (757) 446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com