Join USS Monitor Center’s Director Emeritus John V. Quarstein in the Mariners’ Park Café for this stimulating Civil War themed discussion. The USS Cumberland, one of the few Union warships to escape the destruction of the Gosport Navy Yard on April 20, 1861, was a Raritan-class frigate commissioned in 1842. The Cumberland was cut-down into a sloop of war beginning in 1857 at the Charlestown Navy Yard, Boston, Massachusetts. The warship was named flagship of the Home Squadron in 1860. In early 1861, the Cumberland was dispatched to Hampton Roads due to the rising strife between the North and South. After the destruction of Gosport, the Cumberland was assigned to blockading duty off of Newport News Point. There, on the afternoon of 8 March 1862, the sloop was rammed and sunk by the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia. It was the death knell of wooden warships.