Construction and Early Duties
Minnesota was laid down in May 1854 by the Washington Navy Yard in Washington, D.C.. She was launched on 1 December 1855, sponsored by Susan L. Mann, and commissioned on 21 May 1857 with Captain Samuel Francis Du Pont in command.
Minnesota was named for the Minnesota River. her sister ships were also named for rivers: the Wabash (first in class), Colorado, Merrimack (salvaged and renamed Virginia by the Confederate Navy), and the Roanoke (later converted to a monitor-type).
Minnesota, carrying William B. Reed, U.S. Minister to China, departed from Norfolk, Virginia, on 1 July 1857 for East Asia. During her service with the East India Squadron, she visited many of the principal ports of China and Japan before departing Hong Kong to bring Reed home with a newly negotiated commerce treaty, the Treaty of Tianjin, with China. Upon arrival in Boston, Massachusetts, on 2 June 1859, Minnesota was decommissioned at the Boston Navy Yard in Charlestown, Massachusetts, the same day and remained in ordinary until the outbreak of the American Civil War in April 1861.
Read more about this topic: USS Minnesota (1855)
Famous quotes containing the words construction, early and/or duties:
“There’s no art
To find the mind’s construction in the face:
He was a gentleman on whom I built
An absolute trust.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Neither years nor books have yet availed to extirpate a prejudice then rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men. His duties lead him directly into the holy ground where other men’s aspirations only point. His successes are occasions of the purest joy to all men. Eyes is he to the blind; feet is he to the lame. His failures, if he is worthy, are inlets to higher advantages.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)