The Confederate navy wanted a beast to clear the Neuse River and retake New Bern. What they got was a 152-foot headache. Workers laid the keel of the CSS Neuse in Whitehall in 1862, slapping green pine onto a frame that desperately needed seasoned oak. Iron plating was incredibly scarce in the South. So, the ship sat naked for months waiting for Richmond's Tredegar Iron Works to ship iron plate. When they finally floated her down to Kinston, she immediately ran aground on a sandbar. She sat there for months, a giant, armored paperweight. The vessel showed the sheer desperation of late-war Confederate manufacturing, wasting immense resources on a machine that spent its operational life stuck in the mud due to low water and a severe lack of trained crew.

Union troops closed in during the Battle of Wyse Fork in March 1865. The crew knew the game was up. Instead of letting the Yankees take her, they loaded the guns, fired a final shell at the Union lines, and lit the magazine. The Neuse hissed, exploded, and sank into the river mud. It stayed there for nearly a century. Then, in the early 1960s, three local men dragged the waterlogged hull out of the river. They recovered thousands of artifacts. Spoons, canteens, and even intact artillery shells. Today, those massive timbers sit inside a climate-controlled museum in downtown Kinston. Only three recovered Confederate ironclads exist today. The Neuse remains a brutal, physical reminder of a war fought with improvised, heavy metal.