A confounding act of nature has uncovered one of the nation’s most unusual wartime shipwrecks in eastern North Carolina.
The Union gunboat USS Picket spent much of the past 163 years buried in mud in the Tar River, about a 110-mile drive southeast from Raleigh.
But for reasons unknown, up to 7 feet of riverbed has been scoured away, excavating parts of the 130-foot-long ship not seen since it sank in 1862, according to Nathan Richards, director of the Maritime Studies program at East Carolina University’s Department of History…