Navy Yard

The failed ship went on to a long afterlife. USS Allegheny was an iron-hulled steamer, 185 feet long, laid down at Pittsburgh in 1844 and brought to Memphis on March 1, 1847. Her two eight-bladed Hunter wheels, designed by Lt. William W. Hunter, proved impractical and were cut to four blades, and she was converted to a screw steamer around 1852. Engine trouble cut short a Mediterranean cruise in 1849. She ended as a receiving ship at Baltimore, guarded Annapolis in 1861 and was sold at auction at Norfolk in 1869.

What the plaque says

Navy Yard In 1844 the U. S. Government located a military shipyard on the Memphis waterfront between Auction and Market streets. The facility completed outfitting its only product, the USS Allegheny, in 1847. This iron-hulled warship's propulsion system proved inefficient, tainting the Memphis yard with a major failure. The navy closed the shipyard in 1855 and returned the property to the City of Memphis. During World War II, a private firm built small naval craft here.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — 1.2 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• Sun Studio — 1.5 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 1.6 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 1.7 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.

More markers nearby

• Fort Adams / Fort Pike — steps away
• The Pinch — 0.3 mi
• Casey Jones — 0.4 mi
• Josiah T. Settle 1850-1915 — 0.5 mi