SS Selma

The SS Selma had a stranger career as a wreck than at sea. Concrete ships came from President Wilson's Emergency Fleet program, which called for twenty-four; only twelve were built, and sailors called them floating tombstones. Selma's sister ship Latham also hit a jetty and ended as a floating oil tank near New Orleans. After the 1922 scuttling off Pelican Island, Selma was used in 1926 to store explosives and in 1928 as a work area by an oil exploration company. During Prohibition customs inspectors smashed at least 11,000 bottles of bootleg liquor in her hold.

What the plaque says

SS Selma Steel shortages during World War I led the U.S. to build experimental concrete ships, the largest of which was the SS Selma, today partially submerged in Galveston Bay and visible from this site. It was built in Mobile, Alabama, and named to honor Selma, Alabama, for its successful wartime liberty loan drive. The ship was launched on June 28, 1919, the same day Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles, officially ending World War I. As a result, the 7,500-ton ship never entered the war, but instead was placed into service as an oil tanker in the Gulf of Mexico. In Tampico, Mexico, on May 31, 1920, the SS Selma hit a jetty, ripping a hole in its hull about 60 feet long. After attempts to repair the ship in Galveston failed and efforts to sell the ship proved unsuccessful, U.S. officials decided to intentionally scuttle the ship. A channel 1,500 feet long and 25 feet deep was dug to a point just off Pelican Island's eastern shoreline where on March 9, 1922, the ship was laid to rest. The Selma has since been the object of failed plans to convert it for use as a fishing pier, pleasure resort, and oyster farm. Long a source of curiosity and local legend, it remains important to scientists who continued to study aspects of its concrete construction. In 1993, the SS Selma was designated a State Archeological Landmark, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994, and has been designated as the Official Flagship of the Texas Army. (1995)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa — 2.1 mi
  An iron barque launched in Aberdeen in 1877 that called at Galveston twice, ended up smuggling in the Adriatic, and was bought back from a Greek scrapyard to sail again from Pier 22.
• The Strand — 2.3 mi
  Five blocks of iron-front brick buildings near the harbor that were once called the Wall Street of the Southwest, emptied after 1900 and brought back by preservationists from the 1960s.
• 1892 Bishop's Palace — 2.3 mi
  Nicholas Clayton's stone house on Broadway for the railroad lawyer Walter Gresham, later home to Galveston's Catholic bishops and one of the most admired Victorian houses in the country.
• 1859 Ashton Villa — 2.7 mi
  A brick Italianate house on Broadway, built with enslaved labor in 1859, whose lawn has held Galveston's Juneteenth commemoration of General Orders, No. 3 every year since 1979.

More markers nearby

• Galveston: Gateway to Texas — steps away
• Galveston Quarantine Stations — steps away
• World War I Physicians from Galveston — 1.8 mi
• Galveston Seawall — 1.8 mi