Dale,

One of the things that I find interesting about the Chattahoochee and the contracted gunboats is that they were to be screw rather than paddlewheel. Screw propulsion was more advanced, and it required some decent drive shafts and packing boxes. These were things the CSA had great difficulty producing early in the war, at least for larger vessels. Getting them to Saffold must have been done by a combination of rail and barge/steamer since there was no direct rail link. (I doubt they would have sent such heavy/large freight via wagon through the marshy expanses of SW Georgia, but perhaps there was a route for that.)

Wouldn't the vessels available for "organ transplant" for the Saffold projects have all been paddlewheel steamers requiring new drive linkages/gearboxes to be fabricated for use with screw propulsion? If so then this might have been the critical portion of machinery that could not be obtained in a backwater that the govt. deemed non-critical at the time.

And let's not forget officers. If the CSN did not assign a competent officer to Saffold to finish out other boats, then they would have been unlikely to ever be completed. Perhaps I am mistaken but it seems that it typically required an energetic officer to complete a CSN vessel. The absence of one might be used to indicate a project was receiving little priority from above.

My first inclination was to discount the Saffold yard, but they did produce a functioning screw-driven steamer in the middle of nowhere (under Jones' guidance), so this wasn't *just* a wartime profiteering scam...although it might have been both profiteering and producing product when needed.

Don't know if this helps you, but the discussion "scratches an itch" that has been bothering me recently. I've learned a lot more about Saffold by reading your site posts about it and checking a few other sites.