This photo provided by John Potter of Lenoir, N.C., shows a framed image that historians have long thought might be the only existing photograph of the Confederate ironclad CSS Georgia. Potter says he created the image as a hoax three decades ago, when he was a teenager, using a model of the ship and his brother posing as a soldier. (John Potter, The Associated Press)
Re: “Civil War photo was teenage hoax,” April 14 news story.
The story about a teenager’s 1986 long-lived hoax regarding the Confederate warship Georgia was of passing interest. What caught my eye, however, was that, according to the article, “The Army Corps of Engineers embarked this year on a $14 million project to raise the Georgia’s wreckage from the river.”
In this era of inadequate federal funding for everything from national parks and education to food stamps and veterans, by what rationale do we spend $14 million on raising a sunken ship that few have ever heard of and about which even fewer care?
Bill Moore, Denver
This letter was published in the April 21 edition.
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