Mallows Bay: The Ghost Fleet of World War I Ships in the Potomac, Maryland

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, German U-boats were sinking Allied cargo ships faster than they could be replaced. The government's answer was to build a fleet of its own, fast. Steel was scarce, so the new Emergency Fleet Corporation turned to wood. The plan called for 1,000 wooden steamships, cheap enough and quick enough to build faster than the submarines could sink them. Shipyards sprang up across the country, more than 40 of them in 17 states. But building an ocean fleet out of wood proved harder than promised. Critics charged that the ships were badly designed, poorly built, and leaked. The program fell far behind schedule. By the time the war ended in November 1918, not one of the wooden steamships had delivered cargo to a European port. After the war, the ships were worse than useless. Steel ships were available again, and nobody wanted slow, leaky wooden freighters. In 1922, the government sold hundreds of them to the Western Marine and Salvage Company, which towed them up the Potomac to strip out their engines, boilers and metal. That left the wooden hulls, and the company decided to get rid of them by fire. On the morning of November 7, 1925, 31 ships were lashed together with steel cables and set ablaze in the river. The fire burned for hours, and the flames could be seen for miles. It was one of the largest single burnings of ships in U.S. history. The burned-out hulls were hauled into Mallows Bay, a shallow cove on the Maryland shore, and left there. By 1929, 169 ships had been brought into the bay. During World War II, with metal in short supply again, the government hired Bethlehem Steel to go back for the iron still left in more than 100 wrecks. Bethlehem dug a large basin and sealed it off with earthen berms. But the work proved too difficult and too expensive, and it stopped in 1944. More than 100 vessels were left where they lay. Then nature took over. Soil built up inside the hulls, and trees took root, turning some wrecks into small floating forests. Fish, beavers, ospreys, bald eagles and herons moved in. Other abandoned vessels joined the fleet over the years, including the steel ferry Accomac, left at the edge of the bay around 1973 after a fire. Today the bay holds about 200 known vessels spanning centuries of American shipbuilding, often called the largest shipwreck fleet in the Western Hemisphere. In 2015, Mallows Bay was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. On September 3, 2019, it became the heart of the Mallows Bay–Potomac River National Marine Sanctuary, the first new national marine sanctuary in nearly two decades. The ships built to win a war that never needed them are now protected, and some of them have trees growing out of them.