Mallows Bay on the Potomac River contains the largest collection of shipwrecks in North America, including nearly 90 wooden skeletons of World War I cargo ships discarded by the U.S. Shipping Board, sold for salvage, and burned to their waterlines, along with remnants of ships from the American Revolution, an early 1900s four-masted schooner, a steel-hulled car ferry, a log canoe, and several hundred abandoned fishing boats from the 19th and 20th centuries. The bay had been used for thousands of years by Native Americans, as shown by archaeological remains, later took on the name of a local family in the 1800s as Mallow's Bay, and included Cook's Ferry service to Widewater, Virginia. During the Civil War, Union troops halted river passage, and from September 1861 to April 1862 General Hooker's 25,000 Union troops camped on the adjacent hillsides in anticipation of a Confederate invasion that never came; Captain Morgan L. Monroe's sturgeon caviar cannery was also located here. After World War I, quickly made wooden steamships of the U.S. Shipping Board Emergency Fleet, troubled by design limitations including heavy coal requirements, were sold for scrap, and in 1925 the War Department permitted some 200 hulls to be grounded, burned, and beached in Mallow's Bay; on the morning of November 7, 1925, 31 wooden steamships were set afire, and the rest of the fleet met a similar fate. Bethlehem Steel later leased the waterfront property to build a salvage basin for recovering metal remains. Nature has since reclaimed the site, which now shelters abundant wildlife and supports some of the best bass fishing in the country.