On the morning of July 21, 1905, coal passers were stoking the boilers of the USS Bennington, and at 10:38 a.m. a low, rumbling roar crossed San Diego Bay, followed by two quick blasts as boilers in the engine room exploded. Clouds of black steam rose over the waterfront near where the USS Midway is now berthed. Army Captain Rolfe, crossing the bay in a launch on the way to Fort Rosecrans quickly boarded the ship. “The whole deck seemed to lift,” he later told a reporter. When the air over the bay cleared, 65 sailors and one officer lay dead and dying on the decks of the ship and in the surrounding waters. (Paraphrased from A Naval Disaster in San Diego: Inter-Service Cooperation in 1905, published paper by Karen Scanlon and Mary Ellen Cortellini in the Journal of America’s Military Past, 2005.)
Each year a memorial takes place at Fort Rosecrans at the Benningtion Memorial. The graves of the 35 Bennington sailors buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery will be decorated with U.S. Flags and red, white and blue carnations.
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