Battleship sunken in Fayetteville's Cape Fear river?

Several years ago, when I was in the 82nd Airborne Division, out of Fort Bragg, NC, I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine. Our conversation changed to the topic of fishing in and around the Fayetteville, North Carolina area.  He asked me if I had ever seen the battleship that was in the Cape Fear River.  I thought for a moment, an actual battleship in the Cape Fear River, and I said, "Yes I have, you mean the one that's in Wilmington, NC, the USS North Carolina? He said, No, This battleship was sunken, on the side of the Cape Fear River. He said it wasn't really an actual, a real "battleship", like the WWII battleships you're used to seeing, but it was close enough to it. He then told me where to go find it, and this really struck my curiosity. I just had to go out and seek to find this ship and have a look at it.

  I went down to the banks of the Cape Fear River. I walked down and through the through the forested area, down the long embankment. I walked past the Person Street bridge overpass, and walked several hundred yards more. I could just smell the sweet smell of the river water, and as I was getting closer, I hear the rush of the water as it was headed southward bound down the river. 

 Just there, beached along the western bank of the river, just north of the Grove Street Bridge, was this enormous looking bottom half of what appears to be a ship of some sort. It was right there on the Cape Fear River, of all places, in Fayetteville, NC. From the looks of it, the ship looked like it was listing to one side, the side facing the middle of the river. The top half of the ship looked to have been long eroded away.  The top most likely would have been salvaged scrapped away.

I could still clearly see main the deck of it. The deck was buckled. Along the main deck, is what looks to be placements for the gun turrets.  I would roughly estimate the ship to be somewhere around 200 feet long range. It appears small when seen from a distance, but when you get up close to it, right near it, you can actually get to see just the sheer size of this thing.

  Sometime later, I went to the Cape Fear River to do some fishing with my daughter, and my son.  I went to the Campbellton Landing area to park my car. There was this large fishing store there. When I was in the store, I asked the lady who worked there if she knew anything about this ship that was  listing to one side on the banks of the Cape Fear. She then began to tell me the story behind this ship.
 
 Back sometime ago, right after WWII, a man who used to own a Pepsi Cola plant in Fayetteville, or somewhere near Fayetteville, bought a surpluses WWII US Naval submarine destroyer.  He wanted to use it as a for his business, neither as a landing or a museum piece. While towing up it stream in the Cape Fear River, the ship had runned a ground and subsequently got stuck in the mud. They attempted to move it, but the ship was too damn big and heavy, it wouldn't budge an inch. So, they decide to scrap what salvageable metal they could get from it, and just leave it in place.

Here's something else describing what the ship was, and how it ended up along the banks of the Cape Fear:

In the years prior to World War II, Breece’s Landing – established along the banks of the Cape River near the former the Campbellton – was the social center of the city of Fayetteville. This ship that still sits somewhere between the Grove Street Bridge and the Cape Fear River Bridge was:  Patrol Craft 1084, a US Naval ship which saw active service during World War II. Stripped of its guns and sold as surplus after the war, it was purchased to serve as a floating dock for Breece’s Landing.


  Both stories are little bit different, but the ending is the same. Believe whichever one you want to, but they both wind up with having the same fate.

 

 Hence, later, what you see today is what remains left of a ship when exposed to the elements, wind, water, and other erosion factors 70 plus some odd years later.


   I believe everything has its own time and place in this world. What we see today, may just be a fleeting glimpse of it's glorious days fading away.




http://fayetteville.citysearch.com/

http://uboat.net/allies/warships/ship/8660.html