USS Constitution: Live Oak Hull, Jackson's Stolen Head, and a Penny Drive

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Launched in 1797, the 44 gun frigate USS Constitution is the oldest commissioned naval vessel still afloat, though wooden warships of her day lasted perhaps 10 to 15 years. The Naval Act of 1794 funded six frigates to fight Barbary piracy, and Joshua Humphreys designed them long and narrow for speed but heavily gunned, with diagonal riders inside a 21 inch hull of southern live oak cut by enslaved workers on Georgia's Sea Islands. Her launch in Boston in September 1797 stalled twice as her keel sank into the clay. In 1803 Captain Edward Preble faced down a ship in the dark off Gibraltar that claimed to be the 84 gun HMS Donegal; it was the 32 gun HMS Maidstone, and his officers became Preble's Boys.

In July 1812 Captain Isaac Hull escaped five British warships in a dead calm by kedging for 57 hours and dumping 2,300 gallons of drinking water. A month later HMS Guerriere's shot bounced off her sides and a sailor cried that they were made of iron. She went on to beat HMS Java and to take the Cyane and Levant together. Oliver Wendell Holmes's poem Old Ironsides saved her from scrapping in the 1830s, and schoolchildren's pennies funded her 1920s restoration.

Samuel Dewey sawed the head off an Andrew Jackson figurehead during a thunderstorm and delivered it to the Secretary of the Navy.
Lieutenant John Lord found live oak cut in the 1850s still sitting in a pond at the Pensacola naval air station.
A 1992 to 1995 restoration fixed a 13 inch hog using wood from trees downed by Hurricane Hugo.
The Navy keeps a 25,000 acre Constitution Grove in Indiana to grow white oak for future repairs.
In 2022 Commander Billie J. Farrell became the first woman to command the ship.

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