Today at 6:30 p.m. in the Marion Opera House, Christopher Amer, the state’s underwater archeologist with the University of South Carolina and the state’s Institute of Archeology and Anthropology, will give a talk about recent findings at a Marion County Civil War Navy Yard.

As part of their field studies program, ECU students made presentations to the public about their findings during their underwater research in the Great Pee Dee near the Mars Bluff Navy Yard in Marion County.

Archaeologists from the University of South Carolina and East Carolina University have located two large cannon from a sunken Confederate gunboat in the Pee Dee River and have identified where the Mars Bluff Naval Yard once stood on the east side of the river in Marion County.

Archaeologists took the first step in uncovering what life was like for people living near a historic Civil War naval yard where a famous warship was launched more than 100 years ago.

A team of underwater archaeologists from the University of South Carolina will begin work to locate and raise three Confederate cannons – each weighing upwards of 15 tons – from the silty sediment at the bottom of Mars Bluff on the Pee Dee River.