Saturday, October 24th @ 9:00 AM – 9:50 PM     ANDY HALL

“Civil War Blockade Running on the Texas Coast”

In the last months of the American Civil War, the upper Texas coast became a hive of blockade running. Though Texas was often considered an isolated backwater in the conflict, the Union’s pervasive and systematic seizure of Southern ports left Galveston as one of the only strongholds of foreign imports in the anemic supply chain to embattled Confederate forces. Long, fast steamships ran in and out of the city’s port almost every week, bound to and from Cuba. Hall ends this tale with an epilogue that describes the efforts of nautical archaeologists to unravel this tale of daring, desperation and profit.

Andy Hall has volunteered with the office of the State Marine Archaeologist at the Texas Historical Commission to help document historic shipwrecks in Texas waters since 1990. He has worked on numerous marine archaeology projects in Texas, notably from 1995 to 2004 on the Denbigh Project, the most extensive excavation and research program on a Civil War blockade runner in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2001 Hall was part of the inaugural group of volunteer marine archaeological stewards appointed by the Texas Historical Commission, the first group of its kind in the nation. Hall writes and speaks frequently on the subjects of Texas’ maritime history and its military conflicts in the 19th century. In 2012 Hall published his first book, The Galveston-Houston Packet: Steamboats on Buffalo Bayou, with the History Press of Charleston, South Carolina. His second book with the History Press, Civil War Blockade Running on the Texas Coast, was released in 2014. Hall was recently appointed an Honorary Texas Navy Admiral in recognition of his work in bringing Texas’ maritime history to a wider audience.

Publisher: The History Press, June 2014, ISBN:  978-1626195004
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