For Myrtle Beach area historian, raising of Civil War cannons ends decades-long quest

Long before he saw a cannon ball lifted from the Pee Dee River, before the years of scouring brush for Confederate naval artifacts and before he was told of a mysterious “iron log” jutting from a riverbank, Ted Gragg heard a story.

He was 8 years old, new to Horry County and an optometrist named Frank Sanders tried to keep him entertained in the eye specialist’s office. Sanders regaled the boy with the tale of the CSS Pee Dee, a warship that had been secretly built nearly 100 miles inland as part of the fledgling Confederate Navy, only to be scuttled near the end of the Civil War. Sanders had been part of a group that recovered a section of the Pee Dee in 1954, but not the vessel’s cannons.

Those weapons, Sanders told the boy, had never been found.

For Gragg, that story turned into a 62-year fascination, a quest that culminated last week when three multiton cannons finally emerged from the dark river.

“Until you see this thing come out of the water, you can’t imagine what it’s like,” he said. “My first response was almost euphoric: ‘My gosh. We did it. They’re in plain sight again. We’re vindicated. We proved it.’”

Media outlets throughout the country carried news about the recovery of the Pee Dee’s cannons.

Archeologists, historians and other researchers celebrated the effort. Yet few, if any, have studied and labored over the missing cannons the way Gragg has. The owner of Myrtle Beach Indoor Shooting Range, Gragg built a Civil War museum on the range property.

One exhibit holds numerous items from the CSS Pee Dee and the Mars Bluff Navy Yard where it was built. Overall, Gragg estimates he has recovered more than 3,000 artifacts from the site, ranging from wood chisels to a skiff to cannon rounds. He has five filing cabinets full of research documents.

“[It’s] his lifelong project, obviously, as far as looking for the Pee Dee and trying to find the guns,” said Rufus Perdue, a Murrells Inlet diver who discovered the third cannon a few years ago and has worked with Gragg on the search.

Despite hearing the story of the sunken warship as a boy, Gragg didn’t begin seeking the cannons until 1972, following a conversation with a woman he met at a Marion hosiery plant.

Gragg was there as a salesman trying to pitch electrical supplies and the woman was taking a break to enjoy a Pepsi and a Moon Pie.

It was July and the un-airconditioned room was stifling. Gragg made a comment about the heat and the woman told him she wished she could be fishing at an “iron log” on the river that appeared when the water was low.

“What iron log?” the salesman inquired.

“The old one that juts out the bank above the railroad trestle,” she replied.

Gragg was floored: “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. She’s talking about the cannon.’”

He soon began scanning the land near the Marion/Florence county line.

Like many before him, Gragg’s expeditions initially proved futile.

In 1866, the first year after the war, the U.S. Navy looked for the cannons. Around the turn of the century, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tried. So did the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1925.

Sanders and some other businessmen located a boiler and about 36 feet of the vessel in 1954, but not the cannons or an other machinery.

But unlike the other seekers, Gragg never stopped looking.

His breakthrough came on July 4, 1994. His daughter had brought a boyfriend home to meet the family.

Gragg took the group to hunt for the Pee Dee.

Fighting mosquittos and the heat, they used machetes to hack brush beside the river as they searched about 500 yards from the railroad trestle. By noon, the metal detectors hadn’t uncovered anything.

Frustrated, Gragg was preparing to give up when he spotted an old plank sticking from a pile of debris. He sat down on the heap and started clearing the mud away from the wood. Other members of the group pitched in and they soon found they were cleaning off the remnants of a 15-foot skiff.

Then, when one of Gragg’s friends went to the river to clean off his hands, he screamed.

Gragg ran over, thinking a water moccasin had bitten his buddy. That’s when his friend hoisted a nine-inch cannonball from the water.

“That was our first find,” Gragg said. “From there on, we started looking. … We found enough to give us a pretty good idea that we had the ship.”

When Gragg contacted the archeology department at the University of South Carolina, the assistant director wasn’t convinced the Pee Dee had been located.

“He was sort of skeptical because everyone had been looking for that vessel since the end of the war,” Gragg said. “No one had ever really found it.”

But state officials and other researchers gradually came around. Gragg also teamed with a diver named Bob Butler, and on Sept. 17, 1995, Butler put his hands on the first of the cannons.

In the years that followed, a group of history buffs, amateur divers and researchers would visit the site nearly every week, recovering artifacts and documenting the history of the vessel and the naval yard.

The CSS Pee Dee Research and Recovery Team mapped out grid points, took archeology classes, received a license to excavate the site and continued to make discoveries, including the second cannon.

Two members of the team, Perdue and business partner Glenn Dutton, purchased 30 riverfront acres in Marion County near the site.

“We didn’t buy the property because of the guns,” Perdue said. “We bought property because of the history.”

Dutton and Perdue run their own maritime salvage business, and for years they have been diving into the ocean in search of guns to preserve.

“Being historically interested, we set out to find the missing cannon,” Perdue said.

Although Gragg estimates team members poured more than $200,000 of their own money into the project, in 2009 the state received a $200,000 grant from the Drs. Bruce and Lee Foundation in Florence to raise the cannons.

In 2012, Dutton and Perdue found the third cannon. They provided the coordinates to state officials.

“Basically, it was right where it was supposed to be after we figured out the way the dock was built and the way the ship was laid up in there,” Perdue said.

There had been plans to raise the cannons long before last week, but for various reasons the work was never done.

One of the biggest challenges, Perdue said, was simply getting to the sunken weapons. The site had been home to sawmills before and after the war. His crew moved more than 100 logs from one area.

“It’s not like they were just laying out in the sand,” he said. “The guns were buried.”

When an excavator finally hoisted out the cannons, which ranged in size from 9,000 to 15,000 pounds, Dutton was operating the heavy machinery.

“It was a moment in history,” he said. “It’s something you’ll never forget.”

The cannons are now at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center in North Charleston. Eventually, they will displayed at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs building in Florence.

For the Pee Dee research team, it’s time to reflect.

Gragg turns 70 this week, and he acknowledges the adventure seeking must be taken up by a younger crowd. Just because the cannons have been removed, he said, doesn’t mean the river holds no other treasures.

Down river, all the way to the bend where the Pee Dee meets the Waccamaw is largely unexplored.

“What people don’t realize,” Gragg said, “at the time of the Civil War they had chain barriers lined across the river to keep Union vessels from coming upstream. … Governor Magrath of South Carolina put together a flying artillery battery that moved up and down the river. If there was a threat, they constructed like six forts along the river that they could man at a moment’s notice.

“Torpedoes were placed in the river, all kind of stuff. So who knows what’s to be found out there,” he said. “It’s a historical treasure trove really. And there is much, much more to be done.”

This story was originally published October 3, 2015 at 1:20 PM with the headline "For Myrtle Beach area historian, raising of Civil War cannons ends decades-long quest."