When salt gets into things it’s not meant to get into, it almost always causes problems, but the nature of the problem varies by material: organics (like wood, leather and cloth), metals (like iron and copper), and other inorganic materials (like ceramics, glass and stone).

Details on the paper treatment and common conservation techniques for a print that came to the lab due to its fragile condition.

A brief history of the Bronze Doors at The Mariners’ Museum and Park, commissioned in 1932. They once graced the main entrance and now are part of the collection.

An update on the conservation treatment for a bone-handled knife found in the concretion of the turret.

In order to conserve these complex pieces of machinery, a large part of our job is to disassemble them. This allows for appropriate treatment of the different materials.

Although my blogs to date give a very Dahlgren-centric view of what I do, there is far more to USS Monitor than just its guns.

Last month, we were able to complete one of the last major steps in the conservation of USS Monitor’s two XI-Inch Dahlgren shell guns: boring concretion out of the barrels.

It has been too long since we’ve given an update on the conservation of Monitor’s port gun carriage. So long in fact, that the conservation of its 250-ish components are now complete!!!

The anchor, a large Old Plan kedge anchor, had been recovered from the bottom of the Patuxent River near Point Patience, Maryland in 1959 by US Navy divers from the Naval Ordnance Laboratory Test Facility. Luckily, despite spending 145 years underwater, the anchor was in fairly pristine condition and retained many of its identifying marks.