page_title: United States Army Coast Artillery Corps
section_title: Controlled mine fields
hierarchical_section_title: United States Army Coast Artillery Corps / History / Controlled mine fields
caption_attribution_description: Scope and content: Beginning with the Civil War, the U.S. Army recognized a need to provide for coastal defenses in the Pacific NW along the Columbia River and in the Puget Sound. A number of forts, many no longer in service, were built for this purpose.
context_page_description: The U.S. Army Coast Artillery Corps was an administrative corps responsible for coastal, harbor, and anti-aircraft defense of the United States and its possessions between 1901 and 1950. The CAC also operated heavy and railway artillery during World War I.
context_section_description: Circa 1901 the Coast Artillery took responsibility for the installation and operation of the controlled mine fields from the Corps of Engineers; these were planted to be under observation, remotely detonated electrically, and protected by fixed guns. With that responsibility the Coast Artillery began to acquire the vessels required to plant and maintain the mine fields and cables connecting the mines to the mine casemate ashore organized as a "Submarine Mine Battery" within the installation command, "submarine" meaning "underwater" in this case. The larger vessels, called "mine planters", were civilian crewed until the creation of the U.S. Army Mine Planter Service (AMPS) and Warrant Officer Corps in 1918 to provide officers and engineers for the ships designated as mine planters. The mine component was considered to be among the principal armament of coastal defense works.
caption: USAMP Major Samuel Ringgold, built in 1904, which planted practice groups of mines in the Columbia River during the 1920s. (National Archives and Records Administration)
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