USS Camanche (1864)

USS Camanche (1864)

USS Camanche — a 1,335 long tons (1,356 t) Passaic-class monitor — was prefabricated at Jersey City, N.J. by Secor Brothers, Co. Her materials were then disassembled and shipped around Cape Horn in the sailing ship Aquila to San Francisco, Calif., where Aquila sank on 14 November 1863. The monitor's parts were salvaged and assembled at San Francisco and she was launched on 14 November 1864. Camanche went into commission for the United States Navy in May 1865, Lieutenant Commander C.J. McDougal in command.

Commissioned just after the end of the Civil War, for more than a year — until the arrival of the larger twin-turret monitor Monadnock — Camanche was the only U.S. ironclad on the Pacific coast, and she was one of but two stationed there for nearly 25 years.

Camanche's career was a quiet one, with the ship generally maintained in decommissioned status at the Mare Island Navy Yard, in northern San Francisco Bay. She was the California Naval Militia's training ship in 1896–97 and appears to have been reactivated for a few months in 1898, during the Spanish-American War for coastal defense purposes. Camanche was sold on 22 March 1899, but photographic evidence indicates that she remained in the San Francisco area for several years after that.